It’s hard to understand why people are so up in arms about data centers; I mean, what’s not to like? You get brown water oozing out of your faucet. You get to pay more for electricity, in addition to migraines, vertigo, nausea, fluid discharge from your ears, and a constant buzzing that drives people and animals mad.
Trump called data centers “tremendous” and said communities in the US are “begging for them.”
Yes, Americans are just begging for their quality of life to be destroyed. They’re on their knees, big men, strong men, tears in their eyes. Give us data centers! It’s a beautiful thing! Many people are saying.
What about in Europe?
On 31 July 2026, the European Commission opened bidding for up to seven AI Gigafactories, each holding at least 100,000 advanced AI chips, with up to €10 billion in EU and national funding meant to pull in €20 billion more from private investors. The expressions-of-interest round drew 76 proposals across 60 sites in 16 member states, with a combined investment volume above €230 billion. First operations are due no later than 18 months after contracts are signed.
The chips are the easy part. What Brussels is actually procuring is electricity, at a scale and speed that European grids have never delivered, in a political environment where the bill lands on households. In other words, everything is straightforward. Don’t worry about it!
The Consumption Is Already Measured
Europe does not need to model what happens when data centres become a dominant load. Ireland’s data centres drew 7,663 GWh in 2025, up from 5% of metered supply in 2015, and their consumption grew 10% in a year while every other category of user grew 2%. In Frankfurt, Europe’s internet exchange capital, data centres account for up to 40% of the city’s power demand.
The American figures run in the same direction. Virginia’s commercial sector now accounts for 54% of the state’s electricity sales, the highest share of any state, up from 43% in 2014. Commercial sales there grew by nearly 30 million megawatt-hours between 2019 and 2025, faster than every state except Texas, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Summer peak load in PJM’s Dominion zone hit 23,905 MW in 2025, 23% above 2019. Winter peak reached 25,413 MW, 45% above the 2019-20 season.
These absurd, eye-popping stats are audited numbers from grid operators and federal statisticians, not projections from a consultancy deck.
Somebody Else’s Bill
Joseph Bowring, president of PJM’s independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, put data-centre-driven capacity charges across the last four base residual auctions at $29.4 billion, or 46% of the $63.6 billion total. Capacity charges are recovered from load, which means residential, commercial and industrial customers pay them while the cost is attributed elsewhere.
Bowring’s proposed remedies are unusually direct for a market monitor. Run a separate capacity auction for data centres. Require them to contract for their own generation. Where self-supply is unavailable, hold them to 15-year capacity contracts instead of the one-year product every other customer buys.
On 4 March 2026, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI signed the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a voluntary commitment to build, bring or buy all the new electricity their US data centres need and to cover the cost of the resulting grid upgrades. It is non-binding, and the White House has no authority over electricity markets. Bowring says the commitment is impossible to honour under current market rules regardless.
Europe starts from a worse position. Electricity there already costs more than almost anywhere in the developed world, and the queue to connect anything to the grid has become its own asset class. One analysis puts the cost of Europe’s grid-connection workarounds at €176 billion. The Commission is meanwhile pushing for a 300% increase in data centre capacity. How does that work? I don’t know.
Where the Politics Turned
Amsterdam and Dublin imposed moratoriums. That was predictable. The American backlash was not. Authorities have restricted projects in New York state, and on 3 August 2026 Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a comprehensive audit of every data centre moving through ERCOT‘s interconnection process, freezing new projects until it is done. Each applicant must now disclose its tax incentives, its power draw, its water consumption and its source, and what it is doing about noise and traffic. Abbott’s letter cited the failure of some operators to complete the regulator’s water and power survey. ERCOT is reviewing more than 474 gigawatts of new load requests.
A state that spent two decades marketing cheap deregulated power is now auditing the customers who showed up for it. Governors across the PJM states have meanwhile formed a collaborative to pressure the grid operator. Of course, governors in the US are bought and paid for. They do what their donors tell them to do. The voters are kindly invited to pound sand.
Regulators Improvise, Courts Take Over
When Ireland’s national moratorium on new connections was lifted, the regulator attached a condition with teeth. New data centres must cover 80% of their annual demand with additional renewable generation built in Ireland within six years of connecting. Environmental groups went to the High Court in April anyway, arguing the policy still lets Dublin-area facilities lean on fossil gas in breach of national and EU law.
In the Netherlands, a landmark case is testing whether a grid operator can refuse a data centre a connection in the public interest.
Both jurisdictions are running the same experiment. Neither has a settled answer, and in both, the answer is now being written by judges rather than energy ministries.
Seven Gigafactories, and the Question Nobody Has Costed
A 100,000-chip facility draws roughly 70 MW of raw compute load and 120 to 150 MW once cooling, networking and support systems are counted. Analysts put the practical requirement at 200 to 500 MW of contracted low-carbon power per site, with a permitting pathway capable of delivering that capacity in three to five years. Multiply by seven. EU data centre demand is projected to reach 149 to 287 TWh a year by 2030, more than 170% above 2022.
The tender does not say where that power comes from. In the United States, the answer has increasingly been gas turbines and behind-the-meter fuel cells, because new nuclear takes ten to fifteen years and small modular reactors are not commercially available. Europe would be importing the American solution into a system with higher prices, tighter climate law, and voters who have already shown they will use the courts.
Brussels wants the first gigafactories running within 18 months of signature. Ireland gave its data centres six years to build the generation they promised, and is still in court over whether that was enough.
The chips will arrive on schedule. The electricity has to be negotiated with the people who pay for it. At least, we hope so. Maybe not. Maybe people just pay more for electricity and have their water and health stolen by billionaires. It’s happened before.
Is Water in the Constitution?
The data center debate was summed up well by the comedian Tim Dillon. He said in a recent episode of the Tim Dillon Show, “The data centers are coming, and I just don’t have the patience for these families. They keep going, ‘Oh, the water in my house is brown, my home is being taken, they’re putting in a data center.’ And you’re like, I just don’t like people who don’t like progress. There’s nothing more apparent to me than the benefits of a large data center that consumes most of the energy in the area and uses it to power artificial intelligence to do all of the jobs that people used to do. That is a very clear-cut use of resources to better people’s lives.
They say, we want water and we want energy and we want jobs. And I’m here to tell you that water, energy and jobs are the old way of life. We can’t give you the water and the energy. How are we going to run the data center?
People need to accept the reality of where we are, which is that they are simply not needed. Their right to life, whatever that even is. Their right to water, or whatever. Is water in the Constitution? I think not.”
Tim Dillon repeatedly disclaimed his satire, wanting the FBI, J.D. Vance, and Peter Thiel, and the federal government to know that he’s absolutely on board with the extinction agenda.
Author: Tim Tolka, Senior Reporter
The editorial team at #MRKT3.0 has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article.
See Also:
Why Won’t Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland? – MRKT3.0
AI Billionaires Are Donating Billions to Study the Danger of AI Billionaires – MRKT3.0
