Sanders, other senators demand White House address high power prices, WSJ says

Senator Bernie Sanders and several Democratic senators are pressing the White House over rising electric bills, which they partly attribute to the energy demands of AI data centers, The Wall Street Journal’s David Uberti reports. In a letter to the administration and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the lawmakers criticized major tech firms, including Meta (META), OpenAI, Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Oracle (ORCL), for driving massive power consumption through rapid data-center expansion. They argue that President Trump’s efforts to fast-track these projects are creating “bidding wars” with utilities and raising household energy costs. “The point is not to stop the data centers but make sure the costs are borne by the gigantic companies that create them, and that electricity prices are checked or even reduced,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said in an interview. “What we need is some federal safeguards and oversight.”