Tech leaders from some of the country's biggest companies met with President Trump at the White House last night,

promising hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate artificial intelligence and the infrastructure to power it.

They also offered unusually lavish praise for the president at a moment when many in the industry are pressing for a hands-off regulatory approach.

It's all unfolding as electricity bills

climb nationwide, rising faster than inflation in many places and in some regions far more sharply.

The explosive growth of AI and the massive data centers behind it are driving demand and straining

the grid. To explain how this hits consumers and what can be done about it,

I spoke earlier with Ari Pesco, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School.

So electricity prices are surging nationwide. To what extent is the rapid expansion of AI and

those data centers driving up those costs? So the rise of these industrial scale computing facilities that are needed for AI and other

internet applications, it's certainly one of the factors driving up prices.

And I think there's a chance that AI is going to drive our bills even higher in the future.

And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that these facilities are using so much energy that utilities are building billions of dollars of infrastructure to support

them and spreading those costs to all of us. And the second reason is that there are energy markets

where utilities buy their power. And because demand from these AI energy centers

is booming, it's driving up prices. And we're all paying those higher prices.

In some regions are getting hit harder than others. The nationwide average increase is

around 6% compared to as high as 14% in places like New Jersey and New York. What explains those disparities?

Well, a lot of our electricity bill increases are due to decisions being made by your local utility.

Three out of four Americans receive electricity service from a for-profit company that makes money by investing in infrastructures such as power lines and other

related assets. And so a lot of utilities have been replacing power lines on their aging systems

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