More than 200 entities lobbied between April and June on proposals tied to data center electricity demand, marking a sharp rise in Washington activity around the booming sector.
The lobbying covered a wide range of issues, including proposals to prevent data center electric demand from spiking utility rates and a nationwide moratorium on new facilities.
Federal lobbying disclosures reviewed by POLITICO also show significant activity around the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s actions on connecting data centers to the grid.
The surge represents a dramatic increase from the same quarter in 2025, when fewer than 100 companies and groups reported lobbying on data center matters.
“At this point, almost all my clients are lobbying on this,” said Elizabeth Whitney, managing principal at Meguire Whitney, which represents electric cooperatives and municipal power utilities.
The rise in Washington lobbying comes as concern about the energy and environmental impacts of data centers has spread rapidly from local governments all the way to Congress and the White House.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Southern Co. were the highest lobbying spenders in the energy sector during the second quarter, at $3.5 million and $3.2 million respectively, though companies do not break out their lobbying costs by issue.
Technology companies that rely on data centers, including Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Intel, all disclosed lobbying on related legislation, as did real estate developers and labor unions whose members build them.
“This build-out transcends and crosses over all industries,” said Matthew Leggett, a lobbyist at K&L Gates who focuses on energy, adding that it raises questions policymakers had not previously faced.
“It introduces questions into new regions of the country where they didn’t previously exist,” Leggett continued, underscoring how geographically broad the debate has become.
The Sierra Club has not backed a nationwide data center moratorium, focusing its lobbying priorities instead on increasing transparency around data center electricity and water usage.
That transparency push carries bipartisan support, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration already beginning to gather some energy statistics on data centers.
Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy has introduced the Public Oversight of Water and Energy Reporting Act, H.R. 9019, which would institute a range of new disclosure requirements for data centers.
“We don’t know a lot about their electricity use, how they’re deploying backup power, their water usage, their noise impacts, all of these different things that people are concerned about,” one source told POLITICO.
The lobbying activity reflects how rapidly the data center industry has moved from a niche infrastructure concern to one of the central energy policy debates in the United States.
