Local pro-environment groups in all 50 states delivered a blunt message to the U.S. Congress: Put a moratorium on new power-hungry AI data centers, or face the wrath of voters everywhere.

"The harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive," read the letter, signed by more than 350 nonprofit groups, from Alabama Climate Reality to West Virginia Citizen Action Group. That includes the swing state of Michigan, where the OpenAI-led Stargate project is already running into local opposition on a $7 billion data center built on farmland.

Focusing on kitchen-table issues as much as the use of fossil fuels (which power an estimated 56 percent of U.S. data center electricity), the letter noted that electricity bills have shot up by more than 21 percent since 2

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