On January 13, 2026, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, offered a phrase that is starting to sound like the new social contract for the AI era: the tech industry must “pay its way.”
It is a neat line — and, politically, a useful one. Electricity demand in the US is rising again after years of slow growth, and the Energy Information Administration expects consumption to set new records in 2026 and 2027. The biggest, fastest-moving load is not a steel mill or a chemical plant. It is the data center — the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing and, increasingly,
