JUNE 3, 2026 |This week in the newsletter: Anthropic and AI's energy accountability fog, a Google-Voltus bring-your-own-capacity deal, and a new hurdle to building transmission in PJM.
NICK ZENKIN| On Monday, Anthropic said it had filed its preliminary paperwork to the SEC for an IPO, at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. This comes just a week after the company announced that its latest round of fundraising put its value higher than that of OpenAI.
Buried in the big number is a fact that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention: To power its models, Anthropic has contracted 10.3 gigawatts of compute capacity across five infrastructure partners — and operates none of it. Every chip, every server rack, every power contract behind what is positioned to become one of the most valuable companies in the world runs through someone else’s data center and, by proxy, someone else’s grid connection.
Truthfully, I’m being a little dramatic. It’s not an unusual setup for a frontier AI lab. It is, in fact, the defining feature of the business model.
In the popular imagination, the energy and environmental blame game tends to be dominated by the AI brands that people actually know: “ChatGPT is raising my electric bill. Claude uses SO much water.”
But as readers of this newsletter well know, the data center next door likely belongs to a hyperscaler like Amazon or Microsoft, running on a utility contract that the lab’s compute spend is financing from a distance. The labs created the demand, captured the cultural moment, but when it comes to the on-the-ground politics of building (and resisting) data centers, they are far more insulated than the hyperscalers.
It produces a strange energy accountability fog. When communities push back on data centers — and specifically on the rising electricity bills, the water consumption, the impacts to residential areas — they’re reacting to the actions of the data center developers pulling out all the stops to secure Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s business. But in the popular imagination, this dynamic is still largely misunderstood.
It made me curious this week: Which companies actually are the ones powering Anthropic’s growth? I dove into a pile of press releases and SEC filings to figure it out.
The public concern about AI’s energy use is even greater at an inflection point like an IPO, especially one that comes right as election season is heating up. Both candidates and sitting lawmakers are doing their best to distance themselves from AI-induced load growth.
On May 27, for example, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherill unveiled what her administration describes as the country’s first comprehensive statewide data center framework, built around a “bring your own power, pay for your own grid upgrade” principle. This came just days before New Jersey’s primary yesterday.
The market is starting to move in the same direction — as my colleague Maeve Allsup reported yesterday, Google became the first hyperscaler to directly fund a virtual power plant, financing 100 megawatts of distributed capacity in PJM through Voltus rather than simply consuming grid capacity someone else built.
Both Sherill and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (who has been making similar moves to control data centers’ impact on electricity prices) are likely 2028 presidential contenders, and both are betting that data center energy costs are a winning political issue — regardless of whether frustrated voters understand who's actually responsible for the energy costs increasing as a result of the data center boom.
A MESSAGE FROM SHOALS
Today, solar, storage, and data centers are no longer separate domains. They are increasingly part of the same integrated electrical ecosystem, shaped by shared constraints. How is the industry responding to these realities? Uncover seven power distribution trends worth watching in Shoals’ latest eBook.
MAEVE ALLSUP |A planned 100-mile, $960-million transmission project in PJM has found itself in the middle of the debate over data center grid investments and who pays for them.
The Mid-Atlantic Reliability Line, which would run from Pennsylvania to Virginia and cross through parts of Maryland and West Virginia, was selected through the electricity market’s 2022 Regional Transmission Expansion Plan process. And it was established that costs would be shared across all customers in the region, with an additional share apportioned to the utility zone expected to receive the most benefit from the new line.
In the years since, however, the energy landscape has changed dramatically. Data center growth has accelerated; grid constraints have sharpened; and rising electricity costs have become a top political issue nationwide. And in March, hyperscalers had gathered in the Oval Office to sign the president’s “ratepayer protection pledge,” in which they promised to foot the bill for the energy infrastructure required to support their projects, shielding consumers from higher rates.
By the time NextEra, the MARL developer, set out to obtain siting approvals for the project in 2025, local opposition to data centers had become a significant challenge. When MARL hit the dockets, it quickly became a case study for the question of whether, in the wake of the ratepayer protection pledge, the way PJM allocated costs in the past is at odds with the Trump administration's aims.
WKRN| A new Tennessee law requires data centers that have a peak demand of at least 50 MW to pay for their own electricity infrastructure.
Axios| “2028 Democratic contenders who bet big on data centers are suddenly retreating amid a growing voter revolt.”
*Bloomberg| “Mounting local opposition to data center construction presents an opening for Bloom Energy, according to its chief executive officer, who pitches its fuel cells as cleaner and quieter than conventional power-generating systems.”
Catalyst | Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, unpacks his company’s buzzy technology, which deploys wave-powered data centers into the deep ocean.
Politico Energy | Host Josh Siegel interviews David LaCerte, a Republican commissioner at FERC. They discuss FERC’s proposal on AI data center connections, PJM, rising electricity costs, and the permitting reform, among other things.
Events and Resources
Flex Summit 2026 is Latitude Media’s two-day conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the new demand economy, taking shape as AI data centers load growth and electrification have the electricity system at an inflection point. It will take place on October 14-15, 2026, in Austin, Texas. Register your interest here.
This new Brattle report “finds that investments by hyperscalers “in community-based energy programs could reduce generation scarcity and lower household energy bills.”
New York State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, who chairs the Senate Internet and Technology Committee, introduced S.10642, the Responsible Data Center Development Act.
This American Affairs essay by Travis Kavulla, energy editor and former head of policy at Base Power, looks at data centers’ power demand, and its cost.
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