Power grid resources are being sucked away by data centers, and nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents will need to find another power supply within a year.

An energy company in Nevada, USA, recently notified California utility Liberty Utilities that it will stop providing power to approximately 49,000 Lake Tahoe area users after May 2027, forcing local residents to find new sources of power for more than a year. Behind the scenes is the rapid expansion of data centers in the Nevada power grid and the trend of "grabbing power" from residents.

The affected households, located along the California-Nevada border, are currently served by California-based Liberty Utilities, but about 75% of their electricity actually comes from Nevada Energy (NV Energy), which is transported across state lines. NV Energy said that this "cutoff" plan had been brewed as early as 2009 and delayed twice, before the current artificial intelligence boom, but at the same time, the company also publicly praised the data center for bringing "unprecedented" changes to the state power grid.

Jeff Brigger, director of business development at NV Energy, told a forum last September that the company was "excited to serve these loads" and called data centers a "huge opportunity." According to a new report from the Nevada Desert Research Institute, data centers already consumed 22% of the state’s grid’s total power in 2024, and that share is expected to rise to 35% by 2030. The report also states that 12 data centers across the state could together demand up to 5.9 gigawatts of electricity by 2033, equivalent to 2.8 times the power generation capacity of Hoover Dam.

In the short term, Liberty Utilities expects to find a "transition" power supplier, but new power will still have to be imported through NV Energy's transmission lines, meaning the company will have to compete directly with large tech companies and data center developers for resources on Nevada's power grid. In an interview with Fortune, Danielle Hughes, CEO of Tahoe Spark, a nonprofit advocacy group, criticized local residents as being “unrepresented” in the game, describing the current situation as “resources being siphoned off.” Relying more on electricity from California would require building new transmission lines in the Sierra Nevada, which is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In many states in the United States, data center projects have frequently encountered strong backlash at the community level in recent years. The reasons include driving up residents' electricity bills, occupying redundant space in the power grid, and consuming large amounts of local water resources. Relevant reports in recent weeks have shown that an Indianapolis city councilman who supported a data center project was shot at his home; in a small town in Missouri, half of the city council members were recalled by voters after approving a data center project; some data centers in Texas were accused of "stealing" electrician resources originally used for housing construction projects; in Georgia, a data center was exposed to use 29 million gallons of water for free.

At the same time, larger-scale electricity disputes continue to arise: a data center project in Utah may be supported by a self-built power plant, and its electricity consumption is equivalent to twice the electricity consumption of the entire state; Microsoft's investment of US$1 billion in the construction of an artificial intelligence data center in Kenya is analyzed and believed to cause as many as half of the country's users to face the risk of power outages. The stacking of these cases continues to raise concerns about whether AI data centers are eroding public infrastructure and civilian resources.

In this context, nearly 50,000 residents in the Lake Tahoe area have been required to solve the power "fallback path" in more than a year, which is regarded as a concentrated and amplified sample of this national contradiction. While regulators and utilities are still seeking technical and policy paths to strike a balance between supporting the expansion of digital infrastructure and ensuring civilian power security, how to find affordable, sustainable new sources of electricity before the time window closes has become an urgent reality for Lake Tahoe residents.