Furthermore, why is it assumed that as power demand and capacity rises, that prices would rise? In every other market prices drop at scale.

The problem isn't one of scale, but one of paying for the increased infrastructure. It gets passed along to all customers, not only the ones that caused the increased demand.

Eventually you would expect a lower price, but that's long down the road. In the short run increased demand drives up the price.

When demand increases and supply remains static, prices go up.

Supply capacity improvements are incentivized by this price increase.

(If the incentive to improve supply capacity were present at the current price level, then those improvements would already be underway regardless of whether the world had ever seen a datacenter or not.)

> In every other market prices drop at scale.

Markets based on supply and demand all work like this. Increased demand results in the market price increasing.

Electricity demand eventually becomes fuel demand, which has the same thing: more demand results in increased prices for fuel. Since fuels are broadly substitutable in electricity generation, all fuels increase in price when there's (significant) additional demand for electricity and that tends to increase prices of everything with a significant energy component.

Because data centers don't operate in the free market, they work on incentives and public funds given by cities and states.