CHICAGO — Heatwaves aren’t the only thing that have driven up ComEd bills this summer.

Electricity rates went up this summer thanks, in part, to increasing demand for electrical power brought on by the explosion of artificial intelligence — and their required data centers — across the country, experts said.

Companies that provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services — including Google; Meta, formerly Facebook; Amazon and Microsoft — are pushing most of that growth in electrical demand, said Andrew Chien, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Lab.

While the use of cloud computing services for things like file storage has increased, artificial intelligence is the “driver for the majority of new data center growt

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