Nike Carstarphen’s electricity bill is rising, even when she’s using less power.

The Baltimore resident’s electricity rate jumped 20% from August to September, even though she had cut her usage 40%, relying on her air conditioning less during a milder month.

She gets her power from Exelon-owned Baltimore Gas and Electric, whose prices jumped an additional $32 per month on average in September.

These higher costs are driven in large part by new neighbors in Northern Virginia: the world’s biggest cluster of nondescript, power-hungry data centers.

Data centers have powered the internet for years, but with the rise of artificial intelligence, they are projected to need eye-popping amounts of power, along with costly infrastructure upgrades to deliver it. A 2024 report by the US Department of Energy estimated that data centers would use between 6.7 and 12% of the nation’s electricity by 2028.

Electrical wires droop near a data center during high temperatures in Ashburn, Virginia, on June 23. Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Utility customers in neighboring Maryland and Washington, DC, are some of the first in the country starting to see the impacts of the data center boom showing up on their residential electricity bills. The higher costs for BGE customers like Carstarphen are being spread across fall and spring months, when usage is typically low. But they don’t show up as a line item on the bill; the costs are tucked into customers’ electricity supply charges, which typically denote how much en