The US Senate's Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) includes data centre provisions that charge facilities for transmission use and incremental costs while preventing them from passing energy costs to other customers. The bill allows states to overcharge data centres for energy and redirect savings to local customers, recognizing that building data centres serves long-term economic and national security interests only if host communities benefit. This approach aligns with the Inflation Reduction Act's strategy of revitalizing US manufacturing through incentives for batteries, solar panels and EVs, though domestic clean tech remains costlier than Chinese imports without federal support.
Data centres have strong economic momentum, with analysts forecasting trillions in US AI capex and 72% of corporate clean energy power purchase agreements in the Americas in 2025 tied to data centres. The BAAJA correctly assumes data centre developers can afford their own energy costs, especially if sourced from clean energy. Research from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shows current data centre construction supports over 300,000 upstream US manufacturing jobs in critical equipment like transformers and networking systems, a number that could grow with domestic production incentives.
Building data centres in America keeps advanced compute under US jurisdiction, enabling industrial policy to support American workers and companies while maintaining a crucial geopolitical advantage over China in AI capabilities, which could be leveraged for AI safety negotiations despite concerns about cyber and bioengineered risks.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing