Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have banded together to fight Ohio's power company, which is demanding it pay for power grid upgrades needed to support big tech companies' plans to install energy-hungry data centers to power artificial intelligence technology.
American Electric Power Ohio, which supplies electricity to Columbus and other cities as well as rural and suburban areas, told the state's Public Utilities Commission last month that it needs to require payments from tech companies to prevent utilities from passing on rising costs to consumers.
But big tech companies oppose the planned tariffs, calling them “unfair” and “discriminatory,” according to the documents. Obtained by The Washington Post.
In May, AEP Ohio, which often charges customers a monthly fee equal to a percentage of their expected peak power usage, asked tech companies to commit to a 10-year rate structure that would require them to pay 90% of their expected load.
Companies that initially agreed to pay 60 percent of the due amount will end up owing much more, even if they didn't end up using that much electricity, according to the report.
A trial in the case is scheduled for October 30th.
An AEP Ohio spokesperson told The Washington Post the company is “hopeful that a solution will be reached that will continue to move economic development forward in the areas we serve.”
The Washington Post has reached out to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta for comment.
Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, as evidenced by the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and competing bots from other tech giants.
But the technology requires huge amounts of electricity, sourced from fossil fuels, to power the servers and chips that process intensive AI tasks and store vast amounts of data.
Data centers need to have lots of fans running all the time to keep servers cool and prevent them from overheating.
The energy output undermines tech companies' stated climate goals.
In central Ohio, where dozens of data centers are currently operating, the energy load used by those facilities has increased from 100 megawatts in 2020 to 600 megawatts this year, according to AEP Ohio.
The company predicts that amount will reach 5,000 megawatts by 2030, taking into account dozens of pending permit requests from data centers.
There are roughly 3,000 data centers in the United States, most of which are run by little-known companies that rent them out to tech giants.
But AI evangelists such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates say alternative energy sources are needed to power the new technology.
Gates and Altman are investing in startups seeking advances in nuclear fusion, a process in which light atomic nuclei are combined at extremely high temperatures and pressures to release huge amounts of energy.
To date, all nuclear energy has come from nuclear fission reactors that split atoms, a process that produces both energy and radioactive waste.
Nuclear fusion does not produce radioactive waste like fission does.
With post wire
