Berkshire Will Serve Data Centers Only If Other Bills Don't Rise

Greg Abel, who succeeded Warren Buffett, spoke to CNBC on Wednesday, September 2. The interview was conducted from Tokyo, where Berkshire holds its Japanese trading-house stakes. When the conversation turned to selling power to AI data centers, Abel expressed interest and then attached a condition to the middle of his own sentence.

The Condition Set in Tokyo

His words were:

"we are interested in serving these hyperscalers ... if there was no impact to the rates of our other customers"

He then tightened it: there has to be a net benefit to existing customers. In the same interview he identified where the constraint actually sits. Berkshire can produce the energy; the question is how long it takes to get a site ready. He added a third threshold: a project must be welcomed by the community that hosts it. On that point he gave a reading of the temperature: "There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the U.S."

Who says this matters. When a software executive talks about building data centers, he is spending his own capital. When a utility executive talks about it, he recovers that capital through rates a regulator approves, which puts households paying the bill inside the equation. That is exactly what Abel attached a condition to.

How Large Berkshire's Power Business Actually Is

Most investors file Berkshire Hathaway under insurance, railroads and an equity portfolio. The utility side gets less attention, but it is not small. Berkshire Hathaway Energy holds MidAmerican in Iowa, PacifiCorp across six states and NV Energy in Nevada. Total assets stood at $148.3 billion as of 2025, reaching 13 million customers and end-users in the United States, Great Britain and Alberta. MidAmerican alone serves 838,000 electric and 811,000 natural gas customers, with 12,243 megawatts of net owned generation.

In the second quarter, after-tax earnings at the U.S. utilities rose 38% year over year to $597 million, while the energy group as a whole earned $891 million, up 27%. Retail volumes grew roughly 3% through June, with MidAmerican leading at 6%. Berkshire spent $10.6 billion on capital projects in the first half and forecasts another $8.6 billion for the rest of the year.

The chart is not offered as proof of anything about this story. Abel's remarks came in an interview, not in a transaction announcement. The information here sits in the tariff, not in the share price.

A Stated Preference Versus a Binding Instrument

Three questions have to be asked separately in any regulatory story.

What exactly was said? Abel stated a preference. "We are interested, on this condition" is a corporate approach. It is not a prohibition, not a rule, not even a commitment. It is a standard the company set for itself, and a company can loosen a standard it set for itself.

Is there an instrument that makes the preference binding? Not from Berkshire. But instruments do exist at the state level, and they were written quickly during 2026. By MidAmerican's own account, large users face three requirements: they pay for the substation and transmission line needed to connect them, they commit to ten years of power even if consumption fluctuates, and they pay a penalty if they leave early.

Elsewhere the frameworks are more detailed. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission adopted a large-load tariff framework by a 5-0 vote on April 30; it applies to customers above 50 MW individually or 100 MW in aggregate, and requires interconnection studies to be completed within six months. The Oregon Public Utility Commission approved Portland General Electric's Schedule 96 on May 7, effective June 10. Under it, a customer above 20 MW pays minimum demand charges set at 90% of contracted capacity, funds 100% of the distribution upgrades its project requires, and pays an extra 1 cent per kilowatt-hour above 100 MW. The contract term scales with size: it starts at ten years and stretches to thirty for loads of 220 MW or more.

Does the instrument's scope actually cover the problem? Partly. A retail tariff protects the bills of that utility's own customers. It does not reach costs formed in the wholesale market. That gap is the rest of this story.

Who Pays: The Arithmetic Worked Through

One calculation is enough to show why Abel's condition is easy to state and hard to hold. The figures below are rounded and illustrative; they are not MidAmerican's actual contract terms. Only the customer count is real.

What the arithmetic shows is this: a ten-year commitment covers one-third of a thirty-year asset. The remaining two-thirds is unprotected the moment the contract ends. The clause in Oregon's tariff that stretches the term to thirty years as load grows exists precisely to close that gap.

It is worth noting that MidAmerican says an early-exit penalty applies. The size of that penalty is not public, and the size is what decides the outcome. If the penalty covers the remaining invested capital, the gap closes; if it does not, the difference lands on other customers. Whether Abel's condition holds is written in those contract clauses, not in the sentence he spoke on television. The same principle governs risk management: who carries a risk is settled by the contract, not by a statement of intent.

What the Tariff Cannot Reach

A retail tariff protects a utility's own customers. Part of the power supply, however, is bought in regional wholesale markets, and the price formed there enters everyone's bill. The capacity auctions run by PJM, the largest regional market in the United States, are the clearest example.

In an assessment published on July 20, PJM's independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributed $6.3 billion of the latest auction's $16.4 billion in charges — 38% — to data centers. Across the last four auctions the share is higher still: $29.4 billion of $63.6 billion. Market monitor Joseph Bowring put it directly to the consumer: "you are paying for higher energy and transmission costs data centers have caused"

Berkshire's service territories are not inside PJM. But the mechanism travels: however careful a utility is with its own tariff, a wholesale price formed in a neighboring region can still reach its customers' bills. Abel's condition governs his own book, not the market as a whole.

Two Readings

What Is Left

The most measurable part of Abel's remarks is the third condition. Saying a data center must be welcomed where it is built is an admission that permitting timelines will lengthen. His point that generation is not the constraint, but site preparation is, lands in the same place.

Data centers accounting for 8% of MidAmerican's Iowa load also means property tax revenue that, by Abel's account, funds schools and local services. That explains why the condition is framed as "there has to be a net benefit" rather than "we will not serve them."

The concrete thing to watch: in the large-load tariffs state commissions approve, how close the contract term moves to the useful life of the assets, and how much of the remaining invested capital the early-exit penalties actually cover. The details of the framework Pennsylvania adopted in April belong under that same heading.

The Lesson

This article draws on CNBC's September 2 interview as relayed by multiple outlets, Monitoring Analytics' July 20 assessment, decisions by the Pennsylvania and Oregon public utility commissions, MidAmerican Energy's own disclosures and Berkshire Hathaway Energy's 2026 corporate overview. Abel's quoted remarks match verbatim across more than one account. The $2 billion investment, 9.5% return and thirty-year life used in the worked example are illustrative; MidAmerican's actual contract terms are not public.