A household can own no AI shares and still be a party to the boom, through the one contract nobody reads twice: the electricity tariff.
The scale of that participation is already measurable in places. Across the PJM grid, which serves thirteen states and the District of Columbia, the independent market monitor estimated that data centers accounted for 63 percent of the jump in the 2025/26 capacity auction price, which works out to $9.3 billion recovered from customers through higher electricity rates. That is a regional market price, set by an auction, and it says nothing about any one facility or any one company’s contract. It does settle the general question. The cost of the buildout has found its way onto bills, including the bills of people who think of AI, when they think of it, as something on the telephone.
The specific question is harder, and more useful: when a particular campus is built and its forecast disappoints, who pays for what was built to serve it? That depends on an agreement, and agreements can be read, at least in principle.
Monrovia, in principle
AES Indiana’s arrangement to serve Google’s planned data center at Monrovia, approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission under Cause No. 46394, is the best-documented answer available. According to the utility’s October 7 announcement and its explanatory page, Google’s rates will cover the cost of serving the facility under an 80 percent minimum demand obligation. The contract runs at least fifteen years, with financial assurances and provisions intended to keep stranded costs with Google if it leaves. The commission’s order confirms minimum demand commitments and an exit fee for early termination; the percentage itself sits in the sealed agreement. Take-or-pay, in other words, with the grid as the pipeline.
That is a real safeguard, written in the right place, before construction. It also arrives wrapped in a headline that deserves unwrapping. The press release promises an estimated $770 million in savings for other customers. The order sets out both numbers from AES’s own testimony: about $300 million in contribution to existing system fixed costs at the minimum demand level, and about $770 million at the expected level. The larger number assumes the forecast comes true. The smaller one is what the minimum demand charge secures, a contribution to system costs, which is a different thing from a promised cut in anyone’s bill. A household that wants to know what it can rely on should read the second figure, and the utility, understandably, led with the first.
WFYI’s report on the October 7 decision fills in what the press release leaves out. The commission approved a project cost of $737.3 million. Google pays $32.3 million for its direct connection, while $73.8 million of network upgrades goes into AES’s transmission rate base, to be recovered through future retail rates, and the order finds it reasonable for existing customers to be assigned a share of that cost.
The order’s own language is plainer than the press release. The coalition had asked for the upgrades to be assigned directly to the customer, “rather than socializing the cost across all ratepayers,” as the commission summarized it, and for Google to carry any undepreciated balance if it left early. The commission declined both, finding the coalition had “failed to demonstrate” its alternative was better and that the exit proposal was “overly broad.” Its reasoning is that network upgrades serve the whole system, so “it is reasonable for existing customers to also be allocated a portion of the network upgrades.” AES maintains that none of the cost shifts to existing customers, because Google’s payments for the system offset what others are allocated. Allocation and the net effect on a bill are separate questions, and the second depends on figures the public record does not show. On allocation, the coalition lost.
The two eighties
Indiana’s statute adds a second 80 percent, which is the sort of coincidence that muddles public meetings for months. The 2025 text of Indiana Code section 8-1-7.9-22 requires financial assurances covering reimbursement of at least 80 percent of the project costs reasonably allocated to a large-load customer, under the petition route it governs. Google’s 80 percent is a floor on demand, the level of use it pays for even if it uses less. The statute’s 80 percent is a floor on reimbursement of costs. They have different denominators and do different jobs, and neither means that households pick up the other 20 percent of anything.
The distinction matters to the next community, because the statute is the minimum and the Monrovia contract claims to go further. A developer elsewhere can cite compliance with the law while residents reasonably ask for the stronger terms one utility has already shown are possible. Without the agreement in front of them, they cannot tell which they are being offered.
The address, partly redacted
During the proceeding, the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer group that intervened in the docket, asked the commission to make public information AES had marked confidential, including which Alphabet subsidiary had signed the contract and on what terms it would pay. The group also asked that the data center pay all of its transmission network-upgrade costs, even if it closes early. Its program director, Ben Inskeep, said a company of Google’s size must “be transparent with the community, pay its full costs.”
The Account Must Have an Address set the standard for automated determinations: a named principal, a preserved basis, authority to reconsider, and a route to contest the account itself. An invoice is a determination, arrived at by rate schedules and cost allocations instead of a model, and it can be held to the same four-part test. The public order names the contracting party only as “a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc.” Every party to the case, the coalition included, received unredacted copies of the sealed material, and the commission noted that the coalition could not point to anything it had been unable to review. The secrecy runs against the public. The order rules that the sealed material is trade secret and “shall continue to be exempt” from public access, and WFYI reports the exhibits heavily redacted, dollar amounts and rate schedules included; AES says the customer-protection terms were left visible. The allocation itself was explained in public, down to the reasoning on network upgrades. The address exists. Part of it is a trade secret.
In June the commission approved a $71 million rate increase for AES Indiana, a little over $9 a month on a typical bill. On September 2 it agreed to rehear that case after the coalition argued that AES had signed agreements with Google while the proceeding was under way, having played down the likelihood of a large data center arriving. The coalition is careful to say it is not alleging that residents currently pay Google-specific costs; its concern is how a very large new customer should change the way everyone else’s costs are shared. The public routes work here, within limits: the coalition won a rehearing of the rate case and lost its arguments over network upgrades and disclosure. Meanwhile a BlackRock-led consortium has proposed to acquire AES’s parent company, so the utility standing behind the safeguards may itself change hands.
When the guarantor steps half out
Louisiana offers the cautionary version. Entergy Louisiana received approval to build generation to serve Meta’s Hyperion campus, protected by a contract Entergy calls irrevocable and by a guarantee from Meta’s parent company. Meta then moved an 80 percent stake in the data center to an entity backed by the investment firm Blue Owl. The Louisiana Public Service Commission declined to investigate, on its staff’s advice. Advocacy groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, raised the question of what a parent guarantee is worth once the parent has become a minority owner of the thing it guaranteed. Whether the guarantee’s enforceability weakened is a question its terms and exit provisions decide; the groups’ concern is that the people protected had no seat when the structure changed.
The household’s homework
For the household, the practical work is unglamorous. It needs the cost categories for the project and the decision that allocates them. The facility’s own connection may be assigned cleanly to the customer while shared network upgrades are treated differently, and a line that serves several users settles nothing about who caused it to be built. Bills also rise for reasons that have nothing to do with a new campus, so a rate increase on its own proves no subsidy. The causal link lives in the approved investments and the rate calculation, and an accusation without it is as loose as a developer’s promise that everyone benefits. This is the same discipline When the Answer Counts asked of a cancellation: the defined effect, written where the affected party can read it, with evidence that the commitment took effect. The subscription ran on billing software and the tariff runs through a rate case, and the fields are the same.
Land and water need their own records. The coalition raised the prospect of eminent domain for transmission lines built to serve a single customer, and AES’s answer, recorded in the order, was that “siting issues are not part of the Commission’s regulatory framework.” An electricity agreement cannot govern water use either, and a planning permission can address land while leaving utility charges to another forum. People affected by the same project may need to approach several authorities for different consequences, the familiar problem Not Our Building traced, where a duty’s boundary stops short of the harm’s route.
Ledger, entry six. Commitment: the large customer pays its own way, including if it leaves. Made by: an Alphabet subsidiary the public order leaves unnamed, through an agreement approved by the state commission. Exposed if it fails: AES Indiana’s other customers, some 530,000 of them. Who can call it in: the utility as counterparty, and the commission; households only indirectly, through intervenors such as the Citizens Action Coalition and the state’s consumer counselor.
The household’s bill has its name printed on it. It is still waiting to learn the other one.
Bibliography
AES Indiana, ‘Data centers’, accessed 15 October 2026.
AES Indiana, ‘IURC Approves Customer-Protected Growth Plan to Serve Large Load Investment, Delivering an Estimated $770 Million in Customer Savings’, 7 October 2026.
Cassel, Zak, ‘Indiana approves AES plan to power Google data center in Monrovia’, WFYI Public Media, 12 October 2026.
Citizens Action Coalition, ‘CAC: IURC must prioritize public interest in AES Indiana data center proposal’, 22 June 2026.
IEEFA, ‘Projected data center growth spurs PJM capacity prices by factor of 10’.
Indiana Public Media, ‘IURC agrees to reconsider AES Indiana rate case following Google, BlackRock developments’, 3 September 2026.
Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, Order in Cause No. 46394, Petition of Indianapolis Power & Light Company d/b/a AES Indiana (Monrovia Project), approved 7 October 2026.
Indiana, Code section 8-1-7.9-22, 2025 text, republished by Justia.
Louisiana Illuminator, ‘Meta’s data center ownership transfer doesn’t concern Louisiana power regulators’, 27 February 2026.
Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Meta’s new data center financial arrangement puts Louisianans at higher risk of shouldering costs of stranded assets’.