The proliferation of AI data centers plugging into the national power grid has helped drive up consumer electricity prices, raising the average national price of electricity by more than 6% in the past year.
That’s not a good look for incumbents ahead of this fall’s election, and President Donald Trump addressed the challenge in his State of the Union address last night.
“We’re telling the major technology companies that they have an obligation to secure their own energy needs,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so nobody’s going to be priced out.”
The hyperscalers in question need not be told. In recent weeks, they have already publicly pledged to cover the cost of electricity by building their own power sources, paying higher rates, or both, part of a broader effort to address PR issues around data center expansion and win over skeptical communities.
On January 11, Microsoft announced its policy to “ensure that the cost of electricity to service our data centers is not passed on to domestic customers.” On January 26, OpenAI committed to “pay your own way for energy so that our operations do not increase your energy prices.” On February 11, Anthropic made the same commitment to “cover the electricity price increases consumers face from our data centers.” Yesterday, Google announced the world’s largest battery project to support a data center in Minnesota.
What these commitments mean in practice, and who will determine which data centers are responsible for which price increases, remains unknown. The White House did not respond to questions about the policy from TechCrunch.
“The handshake deal with Big Tech on data center costs is not good enough,” Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly said on social media. “Americans need a guarantee that energy prices won’t go up and that communities will have a say.”
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White House spokesman Taylor Rodgers said the companies will send representatives to formally sign the pledge at the White House next week. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI are said to be among those taking part. However, none of the companies confirmed their participation.
Even if tech companies commit to shouldering the cost of electricity, local power plants may not be a panacea — they can still have adverse effects on the surrounding environment and stress supply chains for natural gas, turbines, photovoltaics and batteries, depending on how companies want to power their computers.