Bloomberg News
President Donald Trump is convening technology executives at the White House next week to sign pledges committing their companies to foot the electricity bill for energy-hungry data centres.
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Representatives of firms including Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp and Google parent Alphabet Inc. are expected to attend a March 4 event with the president, a White House official said. Others on the invite list include Elon Musk’s xAI Corp., Oracle Corp. and OpenAI Inc.
While the promises wouldn’t be binding — and would lack the force of law — administration officials believe that formal, public pledges could bring accountability and offer some assurance to consumers worried that the rapid development of data centres that are crucial for artificial intelligence could lead to environmental damage and higher costs.
“Under this bold initiative, these massive companies will build, bring or buy their own power supply for new AI data centres, ensuring that Americans’ electricity bills will not increase as demand grows,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday. “President Trump is committed to ensuring American AI dominance while simultaneously lowering costs for working families.”
The ratepayer protection pledge marks the latest step in Trump’s push to address a significant political challenge — mounting electricity prices — before the November midterm elections.
Data centres that are essential to expanding computing power — and driving the AI innovation Trump has championed — are encountering a growing public backlash, with Americans worried they’ll be left footing the bill. The resistance is also being fed by fears about the facilities’ use of water and land as well as their reliance on diesel generators for backup power.
While Trump vowed during the 2024 campaign to slash electricity bills in half, power costs have instead gone up, fed by surging demand from data centres, industrial operations and increased electrification of home heating, cooking and transportation. Nationally, the average retail price for electricity hit 17.24 cents US per kilowatt-hour in December, a six per cent increase from a year earlier.
Some 64 per cent of voters identified utility costs as the most concerning issue when polled about data-centre development by Blue Rose Research for the advocacy group Climate Power.
Opponents of Trump’s pledge derided the initiative as toothless, arguing that nonbinding promises by tech companies can’t be counted on to keep retail power prices in check.
Jesse Lee, a senior adviser with Climate Power, said that rather than offering an “empty promise,” the administration should be seeking to add more power sources to address the coming demand surge. Instead, the Trump administration has extinguished subsidies for renewable energy and sought to halt the construction of offshore wind farms along the United States East Coast.
Trump highlighted the effort in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, casting the buildout of data centres as a chance to lower power costs and improve the nation’s electric-transmission system.
“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up. And in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community and very substantially down.”
The Trump administration separately has pressed the nation’s largest power grid to hold an emergency auction allowing tech companies to bid for long-term electricity supplies.
—With assistance from Courtney Subramanian.
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