House passes bill to shield consumers from data center price hikes on energy

A recent NBC News poll found 70% of adults oppose the construction of AI data centers, like this one in Vernon, Calif., in their neighborhood.Mario Tama / Getty Images fileShareAdd NBC News to GoogleBy Scott WongWASHINGTON — Under pressure to act on unpopular data centers, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation aimed at shielding consumers from higher energy costs when new data centers are built in their communities.

The vote was 417-3. Because GOP leaders brought the bill to the floor under a fast-tracking procedure known as suspension, support from two-thirds of voting lawmakers was required.

The bill, dubbed the Ratepayers Protection Act, is the only legislation related to artificial intelligence that was scheduled for a vote this week as Congress considers its response to dire warnings from some former AI employees about its dangers.

With the House holding its final votes before the midterm elections on Wednesday evening, and the Senate only staying in Washington a few more weeks, not much more is expected to get done to address the AI issue until at least the post-election lame-duck session.

The data center bill was co-sponsored by Reps. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., and Kathy Castor, D-Fla., both members of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

It aims to put the onus and responsibility on tech and data center companies — rather than consumers — to pay for power upgrades required to operate new large data centers.

Specifically, the legislation would create a federal standard for state utility regulators to consider when creating rules for large, high-power data centers to cover the costs of power generation, transmission lines and other infrastructure upgrades needed to power these facilities, according to Evans.

Data centers provide the computing power and storage for artificial intelligence. The Evans-Castor bill, however, does not address any of the recent warnings from AI researchers: that the fast-moving technology could cause human extinction. And it’s unclear what the Senate will do with the bill, if anything. The upper chamber has its own set of data center bills, but it hasn’t moved any.

“Hardworking families should not have to subsidize the energy demands of data centers,” Evans said in a statement after the vote. “America needs the infrastructure to lead the world in AI and outcompete Communist China, but we cannot have that growth at the expense of hardworking families, farmers, seniors, and small businesses.”

Evans, in his first term, is one of the most vulnerable House Republicans of the cycle; Cook Political Report characterized his race against Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel in Colorado as a “toss-up.”

Evans and other at-risk lawmakers had been pressing GOP leaders for a vote on data centers, which have emerged as a key campaign issue in the November midterm elections.

Trump has fully supported the construction of new data centers, saying they are critical for U.S.-based AI companies to compete with China. But voters in swing districts and swing states have argued that data centers are springing up across America too fast, and they’ve begun mobilizing against their construction in many places.

A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll powered by SurveyMonkey found that nearly 70% of respondents oppose the construction of AI data centers in their neighborhood; 45% said they were strongly opposed.

The ratepayer bill was just one of a handful of energy-related bills the House took up in its final week in session before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The votes come as oil remains above $100 a barrel and the high cost of living and inflation remain the top issues heading into Election Day.

Many Democrats supported the measure, saying they didn’t view the bill as harmful, but they panned it as weak.

“Our communities and the people in our districts are so outraged, and they are understandably very angry that Congress isn’t doing enough” on data centers, Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who represents El Paso, told NBC News before the vote. “I’m going to vote yes, but it is truly the bare minimum. In fact, it’s kind of pathetic that all we’re going to do is make them pay their own energy costs.”

“These data centers are going into communities like mine that don’t want them,” she added. “My community does not want data centers, loudly and clearly, and I agree with my community.”

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, who heads Democrats’ policy and communications arm, voted yes but said, “It’s not enough in any way, shape or form.”

And former Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said before the vote that she might support the bill but pointed to President Donald Trump’s comments a day earlier that the AI industry doesn’t need guardrails and that serious safety warnings about AI are a “hoax.”

“This is the same party that has a president that says that the AI threat is a hoax, and so I am worried about just allowing this to be, ‘Oh, we’ve solved it,’” Jayapal said. The effort “is a direct contradiction to what their president is continuing to say in opposing any real regulation.”

Scott WongScott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News.