Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else.

Officials say the amount of energy Georgia's booming data center industry needs is "staggering" and are hoping a new rule will help keep the cost away from normal ratepayers.

As Georgia quickly becomes one of large companies’ favorite states for building data centers, the Georgia Public Service Commission is changing how those centers will pay for power.

The process means that the communities get little input, even though the data centers create both air and noise pollution. Data center builders in California are using a shortcut in the state’s power plant regulations to construct facilities that use enormous amounts of energy with limited public input.

Georgia energy regulators voted Thursday to put some guardrails around the proliferation of power-hungry data centers cropping up across the state. The state Public Service Commission (PSC) unanimously approved a rule that allows new large-load Georgia Power customers using more than 100 megawatts of electricity to be billed based on the risks associated with their