A new market report is drawing a direct line between rising electricity prices across the nation’s largest power grid and one fast-growing source of demand, AI data centers.
For households and businesses across a broad stretch of the Eastern United States, that could mean the effects of the AI boom are showing up in energy costs.
PJM Interconnection, which runs the wholesale electricity market for 67 million people across 13 states, saw average power prices climb to $136.53 per megawatt-hour over the opening quarter of 2026, as reported by Gizmodo.
That was up nearly 76% from the same period a year earlier, according to a new report from Monitoring Analytics.
The report directly tied the increase to rapidly growing demand from large data centers.
“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply-and-demand balance, and high prices,” the report stated.
PJM’s territory includes major data center hubs in the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and South, and the report said the existing power supply is already falling behind. It added: “The current supply of capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future.”
President Trump is proposing that data centers provide their own electricity and not straining the national grid