Rep. Stevens Warns About Expansion of Data Centers and Electricity Costs for Americans

EXCERPT:

STEVENS: "Listen, listen, it baffles me that in the United States of America, in the my home state of Michigan, you have more people right now paying higher rates for their utility bills than the cost of their mortgage in some parts of Michigan. It’s an outrage. Now, these data centers are propped up. They concentrate a lot of wealth. They hold a lot of wealth. And it baffles me that we are just not guaranteeing, for average rate use, low utility bills for people. These data centers could play a role in that. A lot of them are from AI companies that are not publicly traded. They’re extreme concentrated wealth, trillion-dollar enterprises. And I'd really love to see everyone’s bills come down. Because the deal is, is that Michiganders and middle-class people and people trying to get into the middle class, they can’t pay higher bills right now. They cannot pay higher bills. They cannot pay more taxes. We’ve got a Social Security conundrum. We have a debt conundrum. We have China holding our debt right now. And look, we have to have honest conversations, but all I know is my state has about 50 data centers and still really high utility bills. And I have no idea why. I have no idea why Highland Park, Michigan, still is paying water bills for a crisis they didn’t create. I mean, we are almost in the 2030s. And so, my take on this is, guarantee that if you’re going to live in the United States of America, and we’re going to have our resources and our energy used for private sector entities that, yes, help us compete against China, that help us win technology races that I’ve spent a lot of time working on in the science committee, dude, lower people’s bills. Just do — you’re making so much damn money. Yeah, we need to do more infrastructure in this country. We are $40 trillion in debt. Our debt is growing faster than our GDP.”