There is a warehouse in Virginia right now with rows of Nvidia server racks worth more than most towns. They are dark. Not broken. Not waiting on software. Amazon had them shipped early under something called the "Early Rack Receipt" program. Five billion dollars in AI hardware. No power to turn them on.

I can't stop thinking about this.

This Wednesday and Thursday, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon will report earnings. All three will brag about how much they are spending on AI. Wall Street will cheer. The combined number is around $595 billion for this year alone. That is up 77 percent from last year. It is less than the entire GDP of Switzerland.

Last year, the richest man on Earth said the quiet part out loud. Elon Musk called the U.S. dollar — in a single word — “hopeless.” But he wasn’t just venting. He was offering a clue to his latest and greatest innovation yet. Now, with the blessing of President Trump and the U.S. Treasury, it’s finally about to go “live.” And investors who move early could see massive gains.

Go here for the full story.

But here is what nobody on the earnings calls will say. That money needs electricity. Massive, staggering amounts of it. And the grid was not built for this.

Data centers already eat about 4.4 percent of all the electricity used in the United States. That is 176 terawatt hours a year. Goldman Sachs says data center power demand will surge 170 percent by 2030. More than 60 percent of that growth hits the American grid. Not China's. Not Europe's. Ours.

I don't think most people realize where the bill for all this lands.

It lands on you. The average American electric bill is now $166 a month. That is up 5 percent from last year. It is up 29 percent since 2022. That is about an extra $440 a year that was not there four years ago. And it is climbing.

Take a look at this…

It's a radical "light-speed" device that's turning AI as we know it into "Accelerated AI", making it 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient.

In fact, Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, says this device is shattering the limitations of AI and without it, AI can't scale.

If you want to discover what this technology is, why Nvidia is betting billions on it…

And the one stock we believe could be the biggest winner when "Accelerated AI" goes mainstream…

Click here to see all the details.

In Virginia, home to the most data centers on the planet, a man named John Steinbach opened his electric bill in January and saw $281. The month before, it was around $100. He is not alone. Seventy-three percent of Virginia voters now blame data centers for their rising bills. The state had to create a whole new rate class just to shift some of the grid costs off families and onto the tech companies running those server farms. Dominion Energy, the big utility there, added $11.24 a month to the average home bill. A chunk of that pays for new transmission lines and substations to feed data centers.

Virginia is not the only one pushing back. Ohio paused its data center tax breaks. Illinois did the same. Texas froze new data center grid connections in August and ordered a statewide audit. Arizona put a three-year freeze on data center tax breaks. Regulators' staff estimated Georgia Power will need $3.4 billion in new annual revenue by 2031 just to keep up with data center demand. That money comes from somewhere. It comes from the rate base. It comes from you and me.

Here is the number I keep coming back to. In areas with the highest concentration of data centers, wholesale electricity prices jumped as much as 267 percent over five years. That was a Bloomberg analysis. The wholesale price is not your bill. But it feeds into it. It is the cost the utility pays for the electrons it then sells to your house.

And the race is getting faster, not slower. Amazon is not slowing down. It takes delivery of roughly $3 billion more in Nvidia hardware every month. It raised its 2026 AI spending target to $220 billion. Microsoft guided about $175 billion. Alphabet has committed between $195 billion and $205 billion. Meta set a range of $135 billion to $145 billion. Five data centers have hit a full gigawatt of power draw this year. One gigawatt runs about a million homes.

I get it. AI is the future. These companies are building something big. I am not here to argue that point.

But nobody is connecting these two things for regular people. On Wednesday evening, Satya Nadella will talk about Azure. On Thursday, Andy Jassy will talk about AWS. The analysts will ask about margins and revenue growth and cloud backlog. Nobody will ask how much of your electric bill is paying for their wiring.

Here's what worries me. Goldman Sachs calls power "probably the forever bottleneck." If that is true, and if these companies keep spending at this pace, the grid upgrade costs do not stop. They get bigger. Every new substation, every new transmission line, every new gas plant built to keep the lights on in a server farm gets folded into rates. Your rates.

The average American household has already absorbed a 29 percent increase in four years. The next four could be worse.

I do not know exactly how much of your bill is data centers versus other things. Nobody does yet. That is part of the problem. The utilities are not breaking it out clearly. A study from New Jersey found the effect was about $1.84 a month per household when isolated. But that was before this year's spending surge. Before the $595 billion. Before five gigawatt-scale facilities came online. Virginia's own regulators put the residential savings at $5.52 a month if they shifted grid costs to data centers. That tells you how much families are paying right now that they should not be.

Keep an eye on those earnings calls this week. Listen for the capex numbers. Every billion they announce is a billion that needs power. And power comes from a grid that you and I share.

Nobody knows where this levels off. That is what keeps me up.

More on this tomorrow.

— American Ledger