Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal (left to right). File photos: Warren by Gage Skidmore; Van Hollen and Blumenthal from their official Senate portraits. Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 (left); US Senate, public domain (centre and right)
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft say they pay their “fair share” for the power their AI data centres use. A nearly yearlong Senate investigation has found that promise covers far less than it sounds. In a 27-page report, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal say the biggest data centre operators refuse to pay the full cost of the grid upgrades they trigger, keep asking for secrecy deals and will go on seeking tax breaks.
The report, Power and Profits: How the AI Data Center Boom Costs Households and Communities, was released on October 9. It draws on written answers and staff interviews with seven companies that the three Democrats wrote to on December 15, 2025: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty and Equinix.
“Fair share” means their own substation
All four Big Tech firms told the senators they pay for the electricity they use. Google said it pays “for 100 percent of the electricity we use to power our data centers” and Meta “the full costs for energy used by our data centers”. But in interviews, the report says, every developer made clear that “full cost of service” means only infrastructure built exclusively for them, such as a dedicated substation.
The fight is over shared upgrades: new transmission lines and grid work that serve everyone but would not have been built “but for” the data centre. Consumer advocates want data centres to pay all of that. The companies broadly opposed the idea and argued the costs should be spread across all ratepayers, the report says, while lobbying state lawmakers for better terms and threatening to build elsewhere.
The stakes are large. The report cites estimates that data centre demand will add $6.3 billion to bills across the 13 states of the PJM grid in 2028 and 2029, and that Maryland households will pay $1.6 billion over a decade for transmission that will “mainly serve out-of-state data centers”. Google’s own regulatory testimony, it notes, conceded that much of this infrastructure “would not need to be built but for the growth in the data center industry”.
That gap is the same one behind the rising bills on both sides of the Atlantic.
NDAs to keep towns in the dark
All four hyperscalers routinely ask utilities, landowners, partners and sometimes government officials to sign nondisclosure agreements. Several, the report says, “explicitly acknowledged” that NDAs with public officials are meant to keep the local community from learning about a project, and they seek them as early as possible.
Meta defended the practice by saying confidentiality “increases efficiency and speed by enabling all stakeholders to remain focused on the needs of a proposed project”. The senators read that as leaving residents out of the stakeholders who count.
Microsoft said in January that it would stop seeking NDAs with local governments, but confirmed it will keep using them with state utility regulators and power companies. Amazon made a similar pledge on government agencies in early October; the report says it is unclear which bodies that covers or whether it binds Amazon’s contractors. Google and Meta declined to commit to ending NDAs with local governments.
Tax breaks, but no job numbers
Every company except Microsoft, which has dropped local property tax incentives, said it seeks all the tax breaks available, calling it “standard practice”. All said they will keep accepting sales tax exemptions on chips and other equipment, the most valuable break for data centres. None of the seven could or would give comprehensive figures on the full-time jobs their sites create.
The report points to Illinois, which requires 20 jobs for its incentive: 29 of the 34 data centres that qualified by the end of 2025 created exactly 20. The best performer, a Meta site run through a shell company called Goldframe LLC, reportedly created 50 jobs for $50 million in tax benefits, about $1 million a job.
“Bulldozing local communities”
The senators’ conclusion is blunt:
In sum, this investigation finds the data center industry is bulldozing local communities and using their economic resources to play states and local communities against one another, creating a race to the bottom.
Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal, Power and Profits report
It lands as local resistance spreads, from moratorium fights in Palm Beach County, Phoenix and Memphis to states moving to repeal incentives.
Why it matters
The AI build-out runs on power lines, land and tax deals that ordinary households help pay for. This report puts the industry’s own answers on the record: the biggest AI companies want the shared grid costs spread across everyone, and they still want secrecy and subsidies while they build.
Sources: Senators Warren, Van Hollen and Blumenthal, “Power and Profits: How the AI Data Center Boom Costs Households and Communities”, October 2026 (PDF); Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, press release, October 9, 2026.
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