Artificial intelligence has become Wall Street's favorite growth story.
Investors have poured money into companies tied to AI chips, cloud infrastructure, utilities, and data centers as businesses race to build the computing backbone needed for the next generation of software.
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The opportunity is massive, and so is the spending.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms alone are expected to spend roughly $725 billion combined on AI infrastructure in 2026.
Accounting for smaller providers and regional players, the total capex tab is expected to reach $1 trillion.
But the question that needs answering is: who is really paying for all that growth? Increasingly, the answer looks like you are.
The AI Infrastructure Arms Race
The AI boom did not stop at Nvidia's GPUs.
It triggered a full-scale infrastructure arms race involving data centers, networking equipment, power generation, cooling systems, and memory chips.
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That spending has created shortages across the supply chain.
High-bandwidth memory chips remain constrained, advanced GPUs are booked out months in advance, and data center developers are competing aggressively for land, water access, and electricity capacity.
AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity because large language models require nonstop computing power for both training and inference workloads.
As the technology transitions to always-on agentic AI, data center energy draw will rise 14-fold by 2028 and account for 12% of total U.
S. electricity consumption.
The Hidden Energy Crisis
According to U. S.
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Bureau of Labor Statistics data, electricity prices rose 6.1% year over year, marking the eighth month over the past 10 months with increases above 5%.
Meanwhile, overall U. S.
CPI rose 3.8% year over year, the largest increase since May 2023. In other words, electricity prices are climbing about 61% faster than broader inflation.
Regardless of how you look at it, electricity costs are rising faster than household incomes.
No state illustrates the trend better than Virginia, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, particularly in Northern Virginia's "Data Center Alley."
Dominion Energy, the region's largest utility provider, has repeatedly warned in regulatory filings that data center electricity demand is growing faster than almost any previous industrial expansion in state history.
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PJM Interconnection, which manages the power grid for much of the Mid-Atlantic, has also warned that reserve margins are tightening as demand surges.
