Sponsors (3)
The bill creates standardized measurement and international-alignment benefits that improve planning, grid integration, and the ability to quantify AI-related environmental impacts, at the cost of modest federal spending, potential compliance burdens for operators, and risks to proprietary/security interests from more detailed data collection.
Data center operators, utilities, and grid planners gain clearer best practices and standardized accounting for behind-/front-of-meter generation and temporal load profiles, enabling better grid integration, demand management, and operational planning.
Researchers and state/federal policymakers gain standardized, more accurate methods to measure data center energy and water use, improving planning, forecasting, and policy evaluation.
AI developers, tech companies, and researchers benefit from explicit inclusion of AI workloads in measurement standards, helping quantify and manage the environmental impacts of large training and inference jobs.
Data center operators and researchers face proprietary and security risks because collecting and sharing detailed facility and workload data could expose trade secrets or sensitive operational details.
Private data center operators, especially smaller firms, may incur increased compliance, reporting, or data‑sharing costs to meet new measurement and standardization expectations.
Taxpayers and the federal budget will fund roughly $10 million per year (FY2027–FY2029) to support NIST research and administration for the program.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes NIST to run a research program to develop standards and measurement guidance for data center energy and water use, including AI workloads, and funds it at $10M/year for FY2027–FY2029.
Official title: To direct the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop best practices for measuring data center energy use, study data availability for the purpose of improving energy demand forecasting capabilities, and for other purposes.
Introduced June 18, 2026 by Suhas Subramanyam · Last progress June 18, 2026
Requires NIST, working with the Department of Energy, to run a measurement research program that develops or improves methods, definitions, metrics, and technical standards for measuring energy and water use by data centers and their workloads — explicitly including AI model training, inference, and other compute‑intensive processes. The program must research measurement accuracy, produce guidance that accounts for workload types and local conditions, support standardized metrics and data‑sharing, coordinate archiving and international cooperation, engage stakeholders, and brief Congress at 1 and 2 years. Authorizes $10 million per year for fiscal years 2027–2029 for NIST to carry out the program and adds statutory definitions for AI and data center terms to support the activities.