“We’re telling the major tech companies they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs and can build their own power plants so no one’s prices will go up,” Trump said. He called it a “ratepayer protection pledge”.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said yesterday that tech companies would join Trump at the White House next week to formally sign the pledge.
Data centres being built today can use as much power as a small city, and they often require large new transmission lines, power plants and other costly upgrades before they can be connected to the local electric grid.
Historically, utilities have spread those upgrade costs — which can reach billions of dollars — among all customers in their regions.
But politicians are increasingly calling on tech giants to foot most or all of the bill for these upgrades.
In recent weeks, both Microsoft and Anthropic have publicly pledged to pay higher electricity rates to cover their costs.
Many tech companies are also building their own power plants, largely fuelled by natural gas, as Meta is doing with a data centre in El Paso, Texas.
“We absolutely want to pay our fair share of all costs associated with serving us,” Briana Kobor, head of energy market innovation at Google, told a recent gathering of utility regulators in Washington.
Experts say that such pledges could potentially help curb electricity costs for everyone else but the effects would depend on the specifics of the plan.
“If you could wave a magic wand and have tech companies pay for every nickel that’s being spent on infrastructure, that would have a significant effect,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.
“But it gets complicated in practice,” he said. “There are a lot of big question marks here.”
It can be difficult to figure out which expenses should be assigned to new data centres, such as the cost of upgrading transmission lines.
The contracts that data centres sign with local utilities are typically confidential, which can make it hard for the public to verify whether tech companies are paying all of their associated costs.
In some parts of the country, regional grid operators and regulators may also need to rewrite complex rules on how to allocate their costs.
It is also unclear whether any pledges from the major tech giants would apply to the smaller third-party developers that are often the ones building data centres and negotiating power contracts.
On a call with reporters yesterday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said: “Every name you know that’s developing a data centre has been in dialogue with us”.
The tech companies expected to appear with Trump next week include Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI, according to a White House official. Fox News first reported on the list of companies.
Josh Levi, the president of the Data Centre Coalition, a trade association, said in a statement that tech companies plan to “work closely” with the Administration on the issue.
“We appreciate President Trump’s focus on winning the global AI race, and we share his commitment to the continued responsible development of the data centre industry, alongside a more affordable, reliable electric grid that serves all customers,” he said.
Some environmental groups and Democratic lawmakers criticised the pledges as largely symbolic and noted that other Trump Administration actions to throttle wind and solar power could drive up energy costs.
“A handshake agreement with Big Tech over data center costs isn’t good enough,” Senator Mark Kelly, (D-Arizona), wrote on social platform X. “Americans need a guarantee that energy prices won’t soar and communities have a say.”
The Energy Department also announced yesterday that it would loan US$26.5 billion to two electric utilities, Georgia Power and Alabama Power, to help build new gas plants and batteries, and upgrade nuclear plants and transmission lines.
The loan would allow the utilities to reduce their borrowing costs by about US$300 million per year, officials said, and allow Georgia Power to enact a three-year rate freeze at a time when data centres are expanding rapidly in the region.
Last month, the Trump Administration also floated a plan to try to ease the rapid price increases occurring in PJM Interconnection, a regional grid that serves 65 million people in the mid-Atlantic.
That proposal, which would require significant regulatory changes and is still under review by the grid operator, would have tech companies pay to build new power plants in the region through specialised 15-year contracts.
But that plan could take years to have an effect, experts said. That’s because, in the short term, data centres can come online and drive up electricity demand faster than new power plants can be built.
Rising electricity rates have become a volatile political issue in many parts of the country. Over the past six years, the average retail price of electricity has risen faster than inflation in roughly two dozen states.
Some tech firms, electric utilities and Trump Administration officials have disputed the idea that data centres are to blame.
In Virginia, home to the nation’s largest concentrations of data centres, electricity prices have mostly stayed flat over the past six years after adjusting for inflation.
Some analyses have suggested that new data centres can even lower prices by allowing utilities to spread the fixed costs of maintaining the grid among a larger set of customers.
Yet the new pledges suggest that the big data centre companies, known as “hyperscalers”, are scrambling to avoid a backlash.
At least 25 proposed data centres were cancelled last year after protests by nearby communities, according to research by Heatmap, a climate news site.
“The rhetoric from hyperscalers has changed over the past year,” Peskoe said.
“A year ago, they were saying that they were already paying their fair share. Now they seem to be acknowledging that they need to do better.”
Trump had originally promised that he would cut electricity bills in half within 18 months of taking office.
While he almost certainly won’t come close to meeting that pledge, he again promised in his address that energy costs would fall.
“Soon you will see numbers that few people would think were possible to achieve just a short time ago,” he said.
“Nobody can believe when they see energy going down to numbers like that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Brad Plumer
Photographs by: Rebecca Noble, Kenny Holston, Randi Baird
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
