Your Power Bill Went Up 36%. Here’s Why

A Google lawyer walked into a city council meeting in Indianapolis last September. He came to ask for a rezoning on land for a billion-dollar data center. He never made his pitch. He stood up in front of a packed room of angry neighbors, pulled the proposal, and walked out.

I can't stop thinking about that scene. Because while a few towns are winning fights like that one, the rest of us are quietly footing the bill. Your electric bill is going up. Mine too. And most of us have no idea why.

I don't know if you've seen this yet...

But one of the most powerful men on Wall Street, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, has warned "civil unrest" is coming, as a direct result of AI.

He's not alone.

Earlier this year, a report from Citrini Research forecasting what life could look like a few years from now wiped hundreds of billions of dollars out of the stock market.

Already, some stocks (like Gartner) have collapsed as much as 70%.

But we're now approaching the final, most dramatic phase of this crisis.

The next six months are going to change everything.

And it's crucial you take these urgent steps to prepare your money.

Home electric prices are up 36 percent since 2020. That's five years. The average price per kilowatt-hour went from 12.76 cents to 17.44 cents. By September 2027, it's forecast to hit 19.01 cents.

I get it. Everything costs more now. Groceries, gas, insurance, the kid's tuition. But this one has a specific cause. And it isn't what most people think.

A single hyperscale data center uses as much power as 800,000 homes. Not 800 homes. Not 8,000. Eight hundred thousand. And they're going up as fast as the concrete can dry.

Here's the piece that made me sit down. In the PJM region alone — that's the grid serving 65 million people from Chicago to D.C. — households and small businesses paid $4.4 billion in data-center-related transmission costs in 2024. One year. Just for the wires.

Elon Musk just started backing a hot new startup that's already growing faster than Tesla… faster than SpaceX…

And it's even growing 23 times faster than Nvidia.

That's why The Atlantic called it…

"The fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism."

Even though this has nothing to do with robots, self-driving cars and rockets, its CEO is projecting growth of up to 8,000% for this year… Enough to turn $1,000 into $80,000.

Click here and Jeff Brown will show you how to claim your pre-IPO stake for as little as $50.

Utilities have already asked for $31 billion in rate hikes for 2025. That's more than double the year before. Two hundred and ten utilities are filing at once.

The trick has a fancy name. Cost socialization. In plain English: when a hyperscale customer needs new power lines and substations, the utility bundles the cost into the rates everyone pays. The Amazon data center goes up. Your grandmother's bill goes up too.

I don't think most people realize how one-sided this is. The AI companies get the compute. Wall Street gets the stock gains. We get a higher bill and a substation across the road.

On the same day this data came out, President Trump gave a speech. He warned communities pushing back on AI data centers that they'd end up, in his words, "backwards and poor." That was the message. Fight this and you lose.

I don't say that as a partisan thing. His own voters are the ones getting hit hardest. Rural counties. Small towns. Retirees on fixed incomes. A Gallup poll from March showed 70 percent of Americans don't want a data center near where they live. Seventy percent. That's not a fringe position. That's the country.

Here's the number that broke me. In 2025, utilities got requests for 700 gigawatts of new power connections. Mostly from data centers. To put that in plain terms — 700 gigawatts is more electricity than the entire United States used in all of 2023. In one year, from one industry, they asked for more power than the whole country used in twelve months.

Nobody knows where all that power is going to come from. Nobody knows what it will do to our bills five years out. Nobody knows if the grid can even handle it.

What I do know is this. When you see Nvidia's stock rip on another blowout earnings call, some invisible line item on that call is us. The retiree in Virginia opening his summer bill and squinting at the total. The small business owner in Ohio watching his margins get thinner every quarter. The couple in Pennsylvania who cut the AC back to save fifty bucks a month.

Our bills are their earnings.

Here's what worries me. The Google lawyer in Indianapolis walked away that night. But the next one won't. There's too much money on the table now. The companies will keep coming. The bills will keep rising. And now the White House has told anyone who complains to sit down and be quiet or end up poor.

I don't have a clean answer for you. I wish I did. But I wanted you to see the mechanism. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it. Every time your bill goes up, you'll know part of it is paying for a warehouse full of chips somewhere you'll never visit, running for a company you don't own a share of, so that a man in a boardroom can tell his shareholders demand is off the charts.

That's the trade. Nobody asked us if we wanted it.

More on this tomorrow.

— American Ledger