US Senate rejects bill targeting AI data centre electricity costs

Democrats criticise bill as lacking ‘teeth’ and push for mandatory measures to address soaring electricity bills.The United States Senate has thwarted a bill that would have required state regulators to consider forcing data centres and other major electricity users to bear the costs of the infrastructure built to serve them.The measure failed by a vote of 57 to 43 on Wednesday. The proposal needed to pass by at least 60 votes to prevent a filibuster, a procedural hurdle in the Senate that can stymie a bill indefinitely.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3What’s the US–China AI ‘hotline’ that Trump plans to pitch to Xi Jinping?list 2 of 3China vs US: Who is winning the AI race, in four chartslist 3 of 3How an OpenAI ‘agent’ hacked Australia’s Medicare and what that meansend of listOnly four Democrats — Maggie Hassan, Amy Klobuchar, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — joined Republicans to support the bill, which proponents argue would have eased the burden of rising energy costs on individual households.The Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom has led to increasing demand for data centres, which provide computing power for the new technology.There are as many as 5,400 data centres currently in the US, according to some estimates. Critics argue the facilities require substantial amounts of energy to operate, contributing to higher electricity costs.The Ratepayer Protection Act, a first-of-its-kind bipartisan bill, was aimed at addressing the economic concerns linked to the expansion of data centres.It passed the House of Representatives earlier this month in a landslide vote of 417 to three.But Democrats in the Senate argued the bill does not go far enough to protect consumers from high electricity bills. Rather than requiring states to “consider” a federal utility rate standard, some senators advocated instead for mandatory enforcement to guarantee consumer relief.