Vans attributed the data center protests to power shortages, stating that electricity in the United States should be cheap enough not to require metering

U.S. Vice President JD Vance stated at the All-In Summit that U.S. AI data centers are facing increasing opposition, largely because the power supply has not kept up. Residents see data centers being built continuously while their electricity bills are rising, which naturally leads to backlash. He believes the solution is not to build fewer data centers but to increase power generation capacity accordingly.

Vance mentioned that the U.S. has not built enough power facilities in the past generation, and in the future, it should pursue a state where "electricity is so cheap that it doesn't need to be metered." He also compared this to China, arguing that the slow growth of power generation in the U.S. in recent years has already affected the development of new industries like AI. "So cheap that it doesn't need to be metered" is an old slogan from the history of U.S. nuclear energy. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, used it to describe the era of cheap electricity brought by atomic energy.

The IEA estimates that data centers will contribute to about half of the new electricity demand in the U.S. by 2025; the U.S. Congress is also advancing legislation this week to try to prevent the costs of expanding data centers from being passed on to ordinary households.