Doesn't quietly raise the cost of living

This is the commitment I find most often missing from technical conversations, because the mechanism is indirect and the cost lands on people who never chose to participate. Compute demand that grows faster than generation capacity bids up the price of electricity. That price reaches households as a utility bill and an inflation number, not as a line item on anyone’s infrastructure budget.

It is a genuinely contested area, and I try to say so rather than let one figure stand unchallenged: attributing a specific share of a specific price rise to data centres is difficult, and the honest answer varies by grid and by year. Ireland and parts of the US are clearer cases than most.

What isn’t contested is the direction. If an industry’s growth curve routinely outruns the infrastructure it depends on, the difference gets paid by whoever has the least ability to opt out. Designing so that doesn’t happen is a technical choice about efficiency and siting long before it is a policy choice.