Carolyn Kayne lives in a 3,000-square-foot home in Atlanta. She is wearing a ski suit indoors. She has shut off her heat and her water. She is camped in a small back room of the house she owns because the utility bills she once paid without thinking have nearly doubled in two years.

"I guess maybe it is time, you know, to give up my home," Kayne told CBS News, in a story published Saturday.

Her situation is not unusual. According to a CBS News analysis, Georgia Power has imposed six rate hikes in the past three years. Average residential bills have risen from roughly 50 a month to roughly 25. Over the same period, Georgia became one of the country's busiest destinations for new artificial intelligence data centers, lured by the state's discounted industrial power rates.

13 States, One Pattern

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has now documented data-center driven utility bill increases in at least 13 US states. A 2025 Bloomberg analysis found that Americans living near new data centers are paying as much as 267 percent more per month for electricity than they did five years ago.

The mechanism is straightforward. Data centers require enormous, constant, dispatchable power. Utilities build out generation, transmission, and substation capacity to meet that demand. Some of the cost flows back to the data center operators. A great deal of it flows back to ordinary households on the same grid.

Patty Durand, founder of the nonprofit Georgians for Affordable Energy, told CBS the state's residential customers will be on the hook for billions in costs unless lawmakers force a different allocation. Georgia Power has publicly denied that residential ratepayers are subsidizing data center growth and points to a recent rate freeze and a commitment to recycle revenue from large industrial customers back to households. Durand is not convinced. Neither is Carolyn Kayne.

The Politics Have Caught Up

On Friday, Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed legislation that would have made her state the first in the country to ban new data center construction outright. The bill, championed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was driven explicitly by concerns about consumer power costs. Mills said she preferred to study the issue before banning the projects, which would have killed a 50 million development already underway.

That veto is not the end of the story. Maine's bill was a national signal flare. Lawmakers in at least nine other states are now drafting their own data center moratorium, surcharge, or tariff bills, and the patterns CBS documented in Atlanta are exactly the political ammunition they have been waiting for.

Where the Industry Goes Next

The hyperscalers know this. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle are all pivoting toward sites where the cost of power can be insulated from residential rate base. That has meant nuclear power purchase agreements, on-site gas turbines in West Texas, geothermal projects in Nevada, and increasingly aggressive bidding for sites with grid connections that bypass the consumer-facing utility entirely.

The shift will help the long-run politics. It will not help Carolyn Kayne. Her bill is due now. The data centers that helped drive Georgia's grid investment to its current cost level are already built. Whatever federal or state intervention comes next will reshape contracts that have not been signed yet, not the ones already on her ledger.

The defining infrastructure investment of the AI era was supposed to lift everyone. In Georgia, in at least 12 other states, it is doing the opposite. The bill is being paid by households that did not vote for it.

Reporting by Shanelle Kaul, CBS News.