Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would be taking a series of steps towards becoming a “good neighbor” in communities where it is building data centers—including promising to ask public utilities to set higher electricity rates for data centers.
Speaking onstage at an event in Great Falls, Virginia, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith directly referenced a growing national pushback to data centers, describing it as creating “a moment in time when we need to listen, and we need to address these concerns head-on.”
“When I visit communities around the country, people have questions—pointed questions. They even have concerns,” Smith said, as a slide showed headlines from various news outlets about opposition to data centers. “They are the type of questions that we need to heed… We are at a moment of time when people have a lot on their mind. They worry about the price of electricity. They wonder what this big data center will mean to their water supply. They look at this technology and ask, what will it mean for the jobs of the future? What will it mean for the adults of today? What will it mean for their children?”
The announcement follows a post from President Donald Trump on Truth Social Monday in which he pledged that his administration would work with “major American Technology Companies,” including Microsoft, to make sure that data centers don’t inflate customer utility bills.
“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI,” Trump wrote in the post, in which he also accused Democrats of being responsible for the rise in utility bills. “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”
Average electricity bills have risen faster than inflation in recent years in many parts of the country. These price hikes are due to a variety of factors, including the costs of repairing and maintaining the country’s aging electric grid. But higher demand for electricity—including from data centers, which can also be expensive to connect to the grid—plays a role. As technology companies and utilities are predicting a massive new need for energy from the nationwide data center buildout, the Energy Information Administration projects that electric bills will keep increasing through 2026.
Concerns around data centers and electricity bills played a key role in several local and state midterm elections last year, while research released last fall shows that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of 2025, leading to billions of dollars in projects stalled or cancelled. The political divide against data centers appears to be bipartisan. In recent months, influential former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has begun speaking against the energy and water costs of data centers on his War Room podcast, part of a larger pushback from some MAGA figureheads against the AI buildout in the US.
The Trump administration, by contrast, has made expediting the data center buildout in the US a key priority. It has removed a variety of environmental protections for data centers, including water protections, expedited the review of chemicals involved in their use, and encouraged their development on federal land. The Department of Energy has also instructed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees interstate transmission, to work on a suite of issues around data centers and the grid.
Microsoft, which has around 100 data centers planned or under construction across the country, has met with some local pushback to some of its projects. In October, the company canceled plans for a data center in Wisconsin due to local opposition; the group leading the charge against that project warned of a potential “5-15% rate hike to subsidize cheap power.” The company revealed last week that it was also behind a proposed project in Michigan, which was put on hold in December following concerns from community members. Hundreds of residents attended a planning commission meeting for the project Monday night, with many telling local media they were there to express opposition.
During the Tuesday announcement, Smith also said the company would reduce its water use in data centers and “replenish more of your water than we will use.” Concerns around data centers and water use have recently gotten public pushback from the industry, including its allies in the administration. In December, White House AI czar David Sacks shared a tweet from Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruist organization in Washington, DC whose Substack posts casting doubt on the environmental impacts of AI have gained popularity. “The claim that AI data centers consume a large amount of water is a hoax,” Sacks wrote.
Other pledges the company made Tuesday include promises to add jobs to communities, commitments to not ask for tax abatements from local governments, and pledges to invest in local AI training.
The post Microsoft Has a Plan to Keep Its Data Centers From Raising Your Electric Bill appeared first on Wired.
