For years, electricity costs at the Belden Brick Company in Sugarcreek, Ohio, barely moved. Last year they jumped by 90%, driven largely by the data centres multiplying across the region to feed the AI boom.
The 141-year-old manufacturer, whose bricks feature in landmarks including the Alamo and the University of Notre Dame, traced most of the pain to one line on its bill. Its monthly capacity charge climbed from $1,600 to $12,000, part of the same strain now showing up as households across Europe are asked to cut power use and US utilities line up $1.4 trillion in grid spending.
Belden Brick is one of many manufacturers across the heartland facing the squeeze, according to a Reuters review of energy data and interviews with nearly a dozen firms. Factory power bills, a core cost, are rising faster than those for most homes and businesses.
The pressure is concentrated in the 13-state region run by grid operator PJM Interconnection, which runs from New Jersey to northern Illinois and south to Tennessee. A single server warehouse there can use as much power as a mid-sized town, and five of the eight states seen as emerging data centre hubs sit in the Rust Belt, per Synergy Research Group.
Capacity charges, which pay generators to keep supply on hand for peak demand, have soared. PJM’s price leapt from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024 to $329.17 now, a rise of roughly 1,038%, driven mainly by data centres, which made up about 40% of the record $16.4 billion in costs from its most recent auction.
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Those charges filter down unevenly. Average industrial electricity prices rose 31% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Ohio in the year to December 2025, against a 7% national rise, per Reuters calculations of Energy Department data. Households in the two states saw gentler increases of 14% and 9%.
Supply is not keeping pace. Data centres “can be built faster than the generation needed to serve them,” PJM spokesperson Jeff Shields said. Last week the operator asked some users to curb consumption to avoid rolling blackouts, as a heatwave pushed peak demand to a record.
Data centre advocates counter that the surge is forcing overdue grid upgrades. Aaron Tinjum of the Data Center Coalition also points to plant retirements and transmission limits as culprits.
For owners on thin margins, even a small rise bites. Belden has lifted brick prices by 4% and still seen profits shrink. “There are going to be some companies that are on the razor’s edge,” said company president Brad Belden.
Others are improvising. Plaskolite, a plastics maker, saw annual capacity charges across its Pennsylvania and Ohio plants jump to $1.2 million from $200,000, and is weighing a direct natural gas feed. Tosoh SMD, an electronics-materials firm in Grove City, Ohio, is mulling production on the graveyard shift, when power is cheaper.
Regulators are responding, though not always in factories’ favour. Manufacturers sit in the same rate class as data centres, so rules meant to shield households can catch them too.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants firms with onsite generation to pay transmission charges on that power, which manufacturers are appealing, and at least 10 states have their own pending data centre rules. The fight mirrors a recent House vote on who pays for AI data centre energy.
The stakes are political. Rising bills threaten some plants just as President Donald Trump pushes domestic manufacturing. The White House said he has hosted tech firms signing a “ratepayer protection pledge” and ordered new PJM power plants, funded by the tech companies. Industry, meanwhile, is betting on nuclear, including a record run of SMR deals.
“Manufacturers are not data centres,” said Paul Cicio of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America. For now, the build-out promising America an industrial revival is quietly raising the cost of keeping its oldest factories running.
