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Artificial Intelligence is sold to us as a high-tech revolution destined to boost productivity and enrich our lives, but behind the curtain lies a stark industrial reality. The enormous water and energy demands for the daily operation and future-facing growth is driving up your electricity bills, straining local power grids, and creating water shortages in communities. Here’s how ordinary people are paying for the development of AI.
AI Resource Addiction Keeps Growing
Artificial intelligence is powered by data centres that use colossal amounts of energy and are reshaping how electricity is consumed and paid for. In the US, 4% of total electricity consumption was accounted for by data centres in 2023, which is expected to triple to 12% by 2028. Nationwide, utilities have already requested $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 alone – a 142% increase on the same period last year.
And it’s not spread evenly. In states like Virginia, households and small businesses are involuntarily subsidising grid upgrades needed for data centre expansion via spikes in their energy bills. According to Newsweek, the increased consumption by data centres contributed to a 6.5% increase in household energy prices from May 2024 to May 2025. But that’s the average across all states, and some are hit harder than others – Connecticut’s prices rose 18.4%, and Maine saw a 36.3% hike.
AI is Greedy for More
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres worldwide are projected to consume 945 TWh by 2030. That prediction is double the current global usage and would match the total electricity consumption of Japan. To put that into perspective, Japan powers 125 million people with that amount of energy. The scale of resource diversion, or a demand for new, unprecedented amounts of energy, is a huge challenge.
On its own, artificial intelligence could account for nearly half the growth in US electricity demand in the coming years, with the IEA predicting it will overtake all other energy-intensive manufacturing sectors, like steel or cement, in terms of energy consumption.
More Data, More Drought?
Cooling is just as important as electricity generation for data centres, and in many regions is even managed by using clean, drinkable water. Training ChatGPT’s GPT-3 model consumed 700,000 litres of freshwater – enough for hundreds of average US households for a full year – in one single training cycle. By 2027, it’s predicted that artificial intelligence models could demand up to 7 billion m³ every year, surpassing Denmark’s total usage and matching approximately half of the entire UK’s current consumption.
These staggering predictions would see increased pressure on areas already struggling with drought or water scarcity, posing a serious threat to agriculture, domestic supply, and everyday life.
Why Efficiency is Not the Answer for AI
Tech giants tell us that each prompt uses just five drops of water or 0.24Wh of electricity. It’s true that improvements are real, with Google claiming a 97% increase in efficiency since last year, but that doesn’t solve the problem. It actually ends up using more.
Economists call it the Jevons Paradox. As something becomes cheaper to use or more efficient, it gets used more, resulting in higher usage than before the increased efficiency or lower costs. We’re now seeing this in full effect, with efficiency gains dwarfed by exponential usage growth. Regardless of how much less resource-greedy it can get, all projections point to skyrocketing resource usage in the coming years.
How It’s Affecting Ordinary People
- Households are seeing higher energy and water bills to fund grid upgrades, even for people who don’t use the software
- Communities like eastern Ohio are pushing back, refusing to subsidise the tech industry, and regulators are now stepping in to make the data centres pay for their own upgrades
- Farmers and small businesses have their power and water hogged by data centres, inflating overheads and drying up irrigation supplies during peak demand
- Nationwide, emissions continue to rise despite “Net Zero” targets as energy grids and utilities lean on fossil fuels to meet demand
Final Thought
Artificial intelligence comes at a cost whether you use it or not. It’s a heavy industrial use of resources, and should not be mistaken as just helpful software. We’re told it’s getting smarter and more efficient seemingly everyday, but it’s regular people forced to foot the bill for its development, destined for higher costs, more water shortages, and a strain on local infrastructure for many.
What we need now is more transparency, including full lifecycle resource accounting for all AI systems (training and daily use) and fair tariff structures. Big energy users, rather than everyday consumers, should bear the brunt of infrastructure costs, and regulation needs to align the AI expansion with public interest rather than just tech profits.
Join the Conversation
Do you live somewhere near existing data centres, or where they’ll be built in the coming years? How have your energy bills changed, and how do you think we will be able to keep up with the increasing energy demand? Let us know where you think this is headed.
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Categories: Did You Know?, World News
Data centres accelerate transfer of all resource to ultra-rich by freezing, starving and dehydrating everyone else.
I would much prefer to see AI in its present form disappear. I’m an avid reader & absorber of information. Now I find half of the information videos I watch are fake AI efforts. There needs to be a ban on them, as they effectively spread lies which have implications.