But data centers' demands on overloaded transmission lines, compounded by the power sector's labor shortages and plant retirements, have made rising energy costs a volatile issue for voters going into November's midterm elections. "You have communities that really want the data centers, and frankly those are the smart communities," he said. At ​the center of the political battle over data centers is PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator. "AI data centers did not create every challenge facing electric systems, but they have amplified nearly all of them." In ‌PJM's latest capacity-market auction, which secures power from generating sources for peak demand times, data centers accounted for $6.3 billion of capacity-market charges, ​or nearly 40% of the total.