An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A big one draws 50 megawatts or more — the electricity of 30,000 to 50,000 homes — around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.3 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

• A sales-tax exemption critics call the most generous data-center giveaway in the country — an estimated $3.3 billion in forgone revenue over two years.
• A regulatory door held open. Regulators are now fielding hundreds of gigawatts of interconnection requests, the vast majority from data centers, and Texas is on track to pass Virginia as the nation's largest data-center market.

What Texans got:

• The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push ERCOT wholesale electricity prices roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
• A $32 billion grid-expansion build-out that residential customers help pay for.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started talking about protecting "everyday Texans."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

• Tampa Electric: up 86%
• Duke Energy: up 49%
• Florida Power & Light: up 45%

For six of those years, Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's plan for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. So the Albuquerque Journal asked Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, two questions: would he support water-use limits on data centers, and would he support banning them?

He answered the second one.

"I oppose a blanket ban on data centers — they bring jobs and investment."

He added that facilities should go "where water and power resources can actually support them, like southeastern New Mexico where produced water is available."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't limit what data centers use, and a plan to supply them with the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste loosened.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.3 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.