As the world keeps warming and electricity bills take center stage in national politics, the data center boom will drive up US carbon emissions and electricity costs. That’s the message of a new analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists released Wednesday, which models a variety of scenarios for how to fuel the coming AI boom. The US is poised to see a 60 to 80 percent increase in electricity demand through 2050, with data centers alone making up more than half of the increase by the end of this decade, the analysis finds. Predicting the amount of energy the US is going to need for AI in the future is an incredibly tricky project. Technological advances over the next few years could also make data centers and AI much more energy efficient.