A drone view shows air handling units on the roof of a Digital Reality data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.

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Mar 5th 2026|Ashburn, Virginia|4 min read

POWER BILLS are going up in America and the people are angry. They know whom to blame—the bosses of technology firms thirsting for more juice to fuel artificial-intelligence data centres. Ashburn, a town of 45,000 in a featureless part of Virginia that has earned the nickname “Data Centre Alley”, has some 150 of these. They consume roughly as much electricity as Philadelphia, a city of 1.6m. On March 4th Donald Trump convened tech leaders to sign a pledge to “build, bring or buy their own power supply…ensuring that Americans’ electricity bills will not increase”.

Signage for Mizuho Bank Ltd., a unit of Mizuho Financial Group Inc. (MHFG), at one of the bank's branches in Tokyo, Japan.

Americans’ electricity bills are up. Don’t blame AI