Several key tech companies signed a nonbinding pledge at the White House on Wednesday that the Trump administration claims will ensure that tech companies do not pass the cost of data centers onto consumers’ utility bills.
“Data centers … they need some PR help,” said President Donald Trump at the event. “People think that if the data center goes in, their electricity is going to go up.”
He was flanked by representatives from Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Google/Alphabet, Oracle, and Amazon.
Bipartisan anger about data centers and their potential impact on consumers’ electric bills has exploded over the past year. As the White House goes all in on AI, the pledge marks a significant salvo by the Trump administration to assure voters that they will not be affected by rising costs.
But electricity experts and industry insiders threw doubt on how much power the White House actually has to create meaningful consumer protections.
“This is theater,” says Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “This is a press release designed to make it seem like they are addressing this issue. But this issue can only really be addressed by utility regulators or Congress. The White House doesn’t really have a lot of moves here, and I don’t think the tech companies themselves are the most important parties on cost issues.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Data centers played a key role in last year’s elections in certain states, including Georgia and Virginia, and are factoring into other races playing out across the country this month. A recent poll conducted by Heatmap News shows that fewer than 30 percent of American voters would support a data center being built near where they live. A number of states have introduced moratoriums on data centers into their state legislatures this year, while others have bills that would seek to help offload the cost from the consumer to the companies building and operating the facilities.
Over the past few months, some big tech companies—including Microsoft and Anthropic—have rolled out various pledges around their data center construction and operation. These pledges follow multiple reports that the president was seeking assurances from tech companies to help take the costs of data centers off American consumers.
In late January, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that Democrats were to blame for high electricity costs, and that he was “working with major American Technology Companies” to ensure “Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills.” Less than a month later, he said during his State of the Union address that he would introduce a “ratepayer protection pledge.”
“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” he 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 then.”
The pledges made independently by key tech companies this year, and the one signed Wednesday, reiterate a lot of promises and initiatives that some tech companies have already been working on. In a blog post published by Google highlighting its commitment to the pledge, the company lists several ongoing initiatives, including investments in nuclear and geothermal energy as well as agreement frameworks with electric utilities and pledges to invest in job creation.
“We are committing to accelerating these practices and driving new breakthroughs to fulfill the Pledge and secure America’s energy future,” the blog post states.
The pledge is also nonbinding, meaning that there’s no way to track how any of these companies actually follow through on their promises. Contracts between utilities and tech companies are also largely private, making it difficult to see how, exactly, companies will execute the pledge beyond what they choose to share publicly.
But even assuming all the tech companies approach their pledges in good faith, there’s only so much that individual companies—even those with some of the world’s deepest pockets—can do to alleviate the pressures of demand from data centers on the grid.
The US grid is large and massively complex, with aging transmission lines that are proving monumentally costly to upgrade. Utilities earn money only when they propose equipment upgrades, like pipelines and transmissions, to regulators, which then give the green light to pass those costs onto consumers. There’s very little room, Peskoe says, within the current structure for tech companies to act to significantly change consumer bills. Instead, utilities and regulators control the final outcome.
“The challenge here is that the utility business model socialises cost—it’s designed to spread cost to everybody,” he says. “We’re in this new paradigm where we have just a few companies that are imposing billions of dollars of costs.”
Congress, Peskoe says, could make much more of a dent in an issue like this than a voluntary pledge. Lawmakers have introduced several bills to insulate consumers from the data center buildout, including a bipartisan bill in the Senate that seeks to shield consumers from price hikes and force data centers to build their own power sources. (Axios reports that the bill doesn’t have much of a shot of passing in a midterm year.)
Even so, some states are witnessing firsthand just how difficult it is to change the rules around data centers and utilities with legislation. Georgia has seen an influx of both data center projects and bipartisan opposition to those projects: data centers and high electric bills played a key role in the state’s midterm elections. Last week, state lawmakers abruptly stopped a bill in the state Senate that would have mandated no costs related to data centers be passed down to consumers. The state’s powerful electric utility, Georgia Power, was reportedly opposed to the bill. Georgia Power did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (A milder version of the Senate bill, which the utility supports, is still making its way through the legislature.)
And while the companies present at the White House represent the most visible operators of data centers, they aren’t the entirety of the industry. Some initiatives mentioned in the pledge—like building onsite power generation—are massively expensive; smaller data center operators wouldn’t be able to make similar promises. And even large data center construction projects are often handled by a smaller contractor who is responsible for building and sourcing power.
For Peskoe, the most meaningful part of the ratepayer pledge is that it exists at all.
“The first step of solving a problem is admitting that there is a problem,” he says. “That’s the piece that I’ve been most interested in—the acknowledgement that we need to do something about this. We’re seeing a real shift in how the industry talks about this issue.”
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