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Protestors rally against the CoreWeave AI data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey in October. As data center anger has swelled, Congress just passed a bill that could ease their construction. —Stephanie Keith—Getty Images

On Monday, the Senate voted to advance a bipartisan bill aimed at easing the construction of new energy infrastructure. The bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), has a broad base of support, including from labor leaders who contend it will produce thousands of jobs and clean energy proponents who believe it could unlock wind and solar. Its sponsors are hoping to pass the bill before the current Congress ends in January.

But the bill has also received vehement blowback from a growing coalition of anti-data center critics, who argue that it would accelerate the buildout of an industry that Americans resoundingly voted against in the midterm elections. BAAJA does address affordability concerns by forcing data centers to pay the full cost of the upgrades they trigger, and contains transmission reforms designed to modernize the grid. But it also strips back environmental protections and could lead to more data centers powered by gas and built on public lands.

Hundreds of local and national organizations have signed letters urging Congress not to pass the bill as written, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Conversely, many industry trade groups have been supportive of the bill, despite the fact that it would likely make building more expensive. On Sunday, Donald Trump urged the Senate to pass the bill on Truth Social, writing that “China will take any Data Center that we don’t want.”

The bill represents the first major test for Democrats post-election, as they contend with how to deliver on affordability and many other issues in their sprawling coalition at the same time.

“Everything about BAAJA goes against the spirit of voters this midterms, in which we saw voters turn out for candidates who directly oppose data centers,” says Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaigns manager at the environmental nonprofit Oil Change International. “This bill is a massive giveaway to the data center industry—and creates a backdoor for fossil fuels to enter the grid through data centers.”

Gas and Fossil Fuels

America’s data center boom has also been a gas boom. In the scramble to bring AI data centers online as fast as possible, many developers have built their own gas power plants instead of waiting to connect to the grid. Global Energy Monitor data reported by Wired show that U.S. gas projects powering data centers increased from roughly 4 gigawatts in early 2024 to 189 gigawatts in development by mid-2026. In some cases, these gas plants have worsened local pollution and exacerbated health issues like asthma, scientific researchers contend.

BAAJA incentivizes a wide range of energy sources to come online faster, including solar and wind. Many experts are hopeful that the bill will accelerate the buildout of transmission lines that are essential for bringing clean energy online.

But environmentalists worry that the first and foremost beneficiary of the bill won’t be clean energy sources but rather gas-powered data centers, because there is already a massive pipeline of proposed projects waiting for various approvals. Rosenbluth points to several gas-powered data centers that are currently plodding through the permitting process, including the Ports-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio and the STAK Energy Campus in Alaska. If BAAJA were to pass, she says, key environmental permits they are trying to obtain could be fast-tracked, potentially allowing them to come online much more quickly.

Holly Bender, chief program officer of the Sierra Club, says that "based on their need for speed to power, the data center industry is driving a historic and alarming investment in gas and fossil fuels. There’s a lot in this bill that will make it easier and faster to build gas pipelines, while making it harder for communities to have a say.”

Public and Tribal lands

Another major concern from critics is that the bill will lead to many more data centers getting built on federally-owned land. The Trump administration has embraced this idea, and signed an executive order in July 2025 directing the Interior and Energy departments to make federal sites available for data centers and to streamline their environmental reviews. “We’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we’ve got to build AI data centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in 2025.

There are at least 17 active applications connected to data center campuses on public land, covering thousands of acres in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and other states, one recent study found. BAAJA’s permitting provisions could make those projects easier to advance and harder to stop, including limiting judges’ ability to halt construction due to environmental review.

Additionally, some Tribal organizations and leaders have spoken out forcefully against the bill, with a coalition of Tribal leaders writing on Saturday that the bill would “gut the ability of Tribal Nations and the American public to identify and protect historic and cultural places threatened by federally connected projects—including data centers.”

Potential benefits

However, the bill’s advocates argue that it addresses several of the public’s most pressing data center concerns. The first is around affordability: The bill contains ratepayer protections which would require developers to pay for the added cost of transmission. One study estimates that data centers would pay approximately $55 billion in transmission charges over ten years—about $35 billion more than under current policy. The bill establishes protections to prevent households and businesses from being left with the bill for failed projects.

“The day of data center freeloading ends when this bill passes,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors, said last week. He added on Monday that passing the bill would set the stage for Democrats to work on substantial clean energy policies next year when they control both chambers.

A study from the Rhodium Group projected that the bill as introduced will reduce household electricity bills, both by expanding access to lower-cost electricity and by preventing data-center costs from being shifted to other customers. But Meg Slattery, a staff scientist at Earthjustice, contends that the ravenous demand from the data center industry could simply soak up the power that comes online.

“It's quite possible that if there are more gas pipelines being built, for example, that is going to increase data center demand,” she says. “We are supportive of transmission reform because we want to build a clean energy grid that benefits everybody. But these other provisions, we think, are going to fast-track the worst version of this story.”

Following Monday’s cloture vote, the Senate must vote to take up the legislation. If it does, the bill will face the amendment process, and any Senate-passed version would then have to pass the House in identical form before going to Trump.

The bill’s advocates argue that its passage would serve as a rare bipartisan win and a victory for affordability. But critics, especially those on the left, are calling for Democrats to wait until the next Congress. “You just heard Americans demand much more of a say in a way that AI is shaping their lives,” says Michele Jawando, the CEO of Omidyar Network. “Whenever you try to ram something through in a lame duck Congress before you have a hundred new House members, that’s never a good look for either the industry or other actors.”

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