AI Data Centers Push Electricity Bills Up 90% at Ohio's Oldest Brick Plant

Electricity bills at the Belden Brick Company plant in Sugarcreek, Ohio, rose 90% in 2025. The company traced the main cause of the spike to the wave of data centers built in the region to supply computing capacity for the AI industry.

Who is affected, and how?

Belden Brick Company is not just another small-town plant. The 141-year-old brick maker from Sugarcreek has supplied buildings across America: its bricks are in the walls of the historic Alamo and in buildings on the University of Notre Dame campus. In more than a century of operation, the company has survived wars, recessions and industrial crises, and for years electricity remained a predictable, stable line in its budget.

In 2025 that changed. The electricity bill rose 90%, and the company identified the main culprit: data centers multiplying across the region to serve growing demand for AI computing.

• Electricity costs rose 90% in 2025
• Belden Brick was founded 141 years ago and is based in Sugarcreek, Ohio
• The company's bricks were used in the Alamo and the University of Notre Dame
• The main driver of the increase is AI infrastructure data centers in Ohio

Why did the Rust Belt become a magnet for data centers?

The Rust Belt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Michigan have become, over the past few years, one of the main regions for new data center construction. Several factors make them attractive: cheaper land than on the overheated coasts, well-developed industrial power infrastructure, historically low electricity rates, and aggressive tax breaks that states offer to tech investors.

The largest tech companies have made active use of these conditions. But the arrival of computing infrastructure shifts the region's energy balance: a single large data center consumes as much electricity as a small industrial town. When dozens of such facilities appear in a region, they begin competing for power capacity with traditional consumers such as factories, farms and utilities, and they push up wholesale rates.

Who pays for the AI boom's infrastructure?

The Belden Brick story is one instance of a growing systemic conflict. Traditional industrial businesses, households and farms with no connection to the AI economy are, in effect, subsidizing the computing infrastructure of tech giants. The mechanism is simple: when rates across the whole grid rise because of the load from new consumers, everyone connected to the grid pays more, whether or not they use AI products.

A similar situation is being recorded beyond Ohio. It is already typical of Virginia, Texas and other states with a high concentration of data centers. Some US energy regulators have begun studying how to split infrastructure costs between tech companies and other grid customers. For now, though, there are no concrete solutions, and bills keep rising.

The traditional US manufacturing sector as a whole is in a vulnerable position: it lacks the political clout of the tech giants and cannot easily pass costs on to the end consumer. Brick, steel and paper plants are industries that sustained employment in the Rust Belt for decades, and they now face a new form of pressure on operating costs.

What this means

AI's energy footprint is no longer an abstract climate problem; it is becoming a direct financial hit to traditional manufacturing. For a company that has made bricks for 141 years and gets no benefit from the AI boom, a 90% rise in bills in a single year is not a statistic but a real strain on its business model. As data centers keep spreading across US industrial regions, the question of how to fairly distribute the infrastructure costs of the AI economy will become ever more politically charged.