One of the biggest reasons most Americans don’t want a data center built nearby is that they worry it will drive up their utility bills. But whether those bills rise, and by how much, depends on the local power grid and the terms of the deal.

In fact, the impacts have at times been counterintuitive, with new data centers in some cases actually driving down utility bills for other customers on the same grid.

Consider North Dakota. A 2025 study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group found that increased electricity demand from large customers, including data centers, helped lower bills in the state between 2019 and 2024. That’s partly because North Dakota had a relatively abundant supply of electricity, including wind power, and didn’t necessarily need to build new infrastructure to accommodate the additional demand. Instead, utilities could spread their existing costs across more customers, bringing bills down. (That dynamic becomes less likely as the grid runs out of spare capacity, but more on that later.)

The study found that over that five-year period, there were several reasons that prices were rising other locations. Inflation was one obvious driver. But there were a range of other significant causes, from Russia’s war in Ukraine impacting the price of gas for power plants to the cost of utilities making the grid more resilient to wildfires in places like California.

To get a clearer picture of how data centers affect electricity costs, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Harvard Business School took a different approach.

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