Greg Abel, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, used a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick to put a number on the data center pushback building across the United States, and to set out the conditions under which Berkshire will, and will not, power the AI buildout.
‘There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the U.S.,’ Abel said. The resistance, he made clear, is not hypothetical. It is organised, it is political, and it is beginning to reach statehouses.
The Scale of Data Center Pushback
The grievances driving that resistance are not hard to locate. Electricity bills near major data center hubs have climbed as much as 267% over five years, according to Quartz, and data centers now account for between 4% and 5% of all U.S. electricity consumption. For communities watching their power bills rise while giant facilities consume local grid capacity, the trade-off has started to look poor.
At least 11 states now have active moratorium bills on data centers, and more than 150 pieces of energy-related legislation have been considered across statehouses in 2026 alone, according to Quartz. The country hosts roughly 4,700 data centers, and the pipeline keeps expanding.
New York has gone furthest. Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62 on 14 July 2026, creating what is described as the first statewide moratorium enacted nationally. The order targets hyperscale facilities consuming large amounts of energy without delivering commensurate benefits to host communities; smaller operations serving medical research or educational programmes are exempt.
The legislative backdrop to that order was already in place. The New York State Legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act (S10642/A11560) on 4 June 2026, clearing the Senate 44–16 and the Assembly 102–39 in the final hours of the legislative session, according to Harris Beach Murtha. The Act directs the Department of Environmental Conservation to produce an environmental impact report covering water use, electricity consumption, land use, tax revenue, and pollution, and requires data centers to set energy efficiency goals.
The grid pressure behind those votes is visible in the numbers. The New York Independent System Operator reported its large-load interconnection queue grew from six projects totalling roughly 1,045 MW in 2022 to 48 proposals totalling approximately 12 GW by 31 December 2025, according to Harris Beach Murtha. More than two-thirds of those capacity requests entered the queue in 2025 alone, according to ESG Dive.
Berkshire’s Condition for Serving Hyperscalers
Abel’s interest in the sector is primarily about electricity generation and transmission, not the facilities themselves. Berkshire wants the revenue that comes from powering supercomputing campuses, but only on terms that protect existing ratepayers.
The snippet of his remarks that circulated initially quoted Abel saying Berkshire would serve hyperscalers only if there was ‘no impact to the rates of our other customers.’ The fuller picture, reported by CNBC, goes further: Abel stated that Berkshire’s actual policy requires ‘a net benefit to our customers’ as a condition of taking on hyperscaler load.
He pointed to Iowa as evidence the model can work. In the state where Berkshire’s MidAmerican Energy subsidiary operates, approximately 8% of load came from data centers in the prior year. Despite that concentration, MidAmerican’s rates remain 45% below the national average, according to CNBC.
That record is what Abel is offering as a template. The implicit argument: data center growth and rate protection for ordinary customers are not mutually exclusive, provided the utility holds the line on cost allocation.
On Wall Street, Mizuho analyst Vikram Malhotra flagged the political dimension in a note dated 1 September 2026. ‘This is clearly an evolving situation as some investors question the set-up with upcoming mid-term elections and validity of claims around resource consumption and limited long-term job creation,’ Malhotra wrote, according to Traders Union. Malhotra also observed that the data center pushback and resulting project delays could benefit owners of existing facilities, since new supply would be constrained while demand continues to grow.
The midterms, then, are the next stress test. If candidates in power-strained districts run successfully against hyperscaler expansion, the legislative map will harden further. For Berkshire, the bet is that utilities with a clean rate record (MidAmerican’s 45%-below-average benchmark being the exhibit) will be the ones still welcome at the table when the politics settle.
