Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants the data centers that run AI to help pay for the electricity they use. In a Time magazine op-ed published Wednesday, May 27, the Massachusetts Democrat proposed an excise tax on the facilities, with the bill growing as their energy consumption does.
The mechanism is simple enough: meter the power, tax the meter. Warren’s argument is about where the money goes. Gains from AI, she wrote, are landing with a narrow set of firms and executives, while ordinary customers get higher power bills. Families, she said, should be able to recoup some of that as electricity prices “skyrocket.”
The grid is already feeling it in some regions. The facilities draw heavily on local power supplies. Researchers at North Carolina State University found that data center and crypto demand could push electricity costs up by as much as 57 percent in some regions by 2030, and by 6 to 29 percent on average across the country. Goldman Sachs analysts expect household electricity prices to rise another 6 percent through 2027, with data center growth a key reason.
Wealth tax and the “permanent underclass”
The data center levy was one piece. Warren also repeated her support for a wealth tax on billionaires and named two of them: OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
She tied AI’s growth to widening gaps in wealth and work, and warned that fast automation could produce a “permanent underclass.” Leaders of big tech companies have themselves said AI could automate large portions of white-collar work, she noted. Job losses would spread further in the United States, where health insurance often comes with the job.
The scale of money at the top gives her case some of its force. Nvidia, whose chips run almost every major AI system, became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market value and later passed $5.5 trillion.
Altman has floated a different answer. He recently proposed a public wealth fund that would give citizens a financial stake in AI-driven growth.
