Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is challenging his home state’s largest utility to explain its plans to serve sprawling artificial intelligence data centers while electricity rates are rising.
“People cannot afford their energy bills,” Hawley said Wednesday in an interview. “I don’t want to have a bunch of corporate data centers come in, whether it’s AI data centers or something else, and gobble up all of the electricity from the grid and force rates up for everybody else.”
The comments follow a letter the senator sent to Ameren Missouri’s CEO last week and increasingly echo concerns of residents and consumer advocates across the country who are pushing back on data center expansion.
Hawley spoke with President Donald Trump yesterday (he posted a photo of the Oval Office meeting on social network X) and said the president “addressed this particularly. He said our current grid is not adequate for all of these AI data centers. We’re going to have to build it out. I couldn’t agree more, and the data centers ought to pay for it.”
