House moves to keep AI data-center grid costs off household bills

The House has passed the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, an effort to keep the electricity build-out for AI data centers from landing on ordinary customers’ bills. These facilities need enormous amounts of power, and utilities may have to add generation, transmission lines, and other equipment to serve them. If utilities recover those investments through broadly shared rates, households and smaller businesses can end up paying for infrastructure built around a few very large users. The bill is a congressional attempt to draw a clearer line between the cost of serving data centers and the charges borne by everyone else, though it still needs Senate approval before becoming law. The bigger question is not whether AI expands, but who pays for the physical grid that makes that expansion possible.