Ben Inskeep: Centers likely will spur utility costs as AI makes slop

Featured Issue: “Should more Indiana communities institute moratoriums on data center projects?”

You might have noticed something about your electric utility bills this year: They’re a lot more expensive. Hoosier households are expected to experience an average 16.3% rise in their electric utility bills in 2025—or a total of $260. That’s the largest increase of any state in the country, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee Minority. These findings come on the heels of a Citizens Action Coalition analysis showing that Indiana’s investor-owned electric utilities raised residential bills in the past year more than at any point in the past 20 years.

While the factors driving these household bill increases are varied, the recent proliferation of unfathomably energy-intensive data centers, each of which can consume as much power as an entire city, is likely to exacerbate Indiana’s growing utility affordability crisis.

For example, utilities like Indiana Michigan Power and Duke Energy are spreading hundreds of millions of dollars in grid upgrade costs needed for data centers onto the electric bills of other utility customers. Likewise, loopholes in laws like Indiana’s House Enrolled Act 1007, which was sold as requiring data centers to pay at least 80% of new power plant costs to serve them, leave families with little protection from rising bills caused by data centers.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are proposing vast, windowless warehouses in communities across Indiana to train and run their generative artificial intelligence applications.

But AI is just a marketing term wielded to hype a technology that is, at best, half-baked, astronomically expensive and prone to hallucinating. While promoters make outlandish and baseless claims about the potential of generative AI (Cure cancer! Solve climate change! Superintelligence!), its current use reveals a darker reality: It’s stealing from creators, driving an economic bubble, scamming the vulnerable, justifying layoffs, enabling widespread cheating in academics, undermining our mental health, and creating misinformation and nonconsensual deepfakes. There is a reason AI output is now widely referred to as “slop.”

Is AI slop really what we want the Hoosier economy to manufacture in the future? Our legacy manufacturing facilities in Indiana produce high-quality tangible goods like steel, aluminum and cement needed to build our modern society while employing thousands of Hoosiers. If data centers are the factories of the future, they are an inversion of our manufacturing legacy, producing something no one asked for with the clear aim of eliminating the livelihoods of many workers.

Communities across Indiana are now grappling with an avalanche of AI data center proposals. They are rightly wondering why they should shoulder higher bills, more pollution and diminished freshwater availability—as well as the loss of billions in tax revenue—because of the lucrative government subsidies being handed out to these multitrillion-dollar companies.

We’re already paying the price, both literally and figuratively, when it comes to AI data centers.

The real question, therefore, is not whether local communities should issue moratoriums for AI data centers—it’s why the state hasn’t issued one already.•

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Inskeep is program director of Indianapolis-based Citizens Action Coalition.Send comments to [email protected].

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