Oregon just did something that should be obvious everywhere: making data centers pay the full cost of expanding the power grid to meet their massive electricity demands.

The state's Public Utility Commission approved a new rate structure that requires data centers and other large industrial users to cover infrastructure upgrade costs proportional to their usage. Previously, those costs were socialized across all ratepayers — meaning homeowners and small businesses subsidized the grid expansions needed for facilities that can consume as much power as entire towns.

Let's be clear about the scale here. A modern AI data center can require 100-300 megawatts of continuous power. That's roughly the electrical consumption of 75,000 to 225,000 homes. When a facility like that comes online, it doesn't just use existing grid capacity — it requires new substations, upgraded transmission lines, and sometimes entirely new power generation sources.

Under the old model, utilities would build that infrastructure and spread the costs across their entire customer base through higher rates. Your electric bill went up a few dollars per month so that Microsoft or Google could plug in another data center training frontier AI models.

Oregon's new approach changes that math. Data centers now have to pay what's effectively a connection fee that covers the actual infrastructure costs their operations require. If a facility needs a new substation, the operator pays for that substation. If they require upgraded transmission capacity, they fund those upgrades.

This matters beyond Oregon. Data center construction is accelerating globally, driven by AI's computational demands. Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Arizona — every state with cheap power and favorable business climates is seeing data center proposals. Many are being approved with the assumption that more industrial users means more economic activity and tax revenue.

But the actual fiscal calculus is more complex. Data centers employ relatively few people compared to their infrastructure footprint. They generate property tax revenue, but they also strain utilities, consume enormous water resources for cooling, and can create power reliability issues for other users during peak demand periods.