Top AI executives on Wednesday pledged to cover the energy costs created by their data centers at an event with President Donald Trump, as the administration tries to respond to voter backlash against costly utility bills.
Trump announced the voluntary initiative during his State of the Union address. Companies will face no penalties from the government if they do not comply with its terms.
The event highlighted the administration’s awareness of bipartisan anger toward rising energy bills — 65 percent of voters said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of inflation in a February Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Sitting around a table in the Indian Treaty room of the White House with executives from Oracle, OpenAI and Microsoft, Trump asserted that the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” would ensure that consumers aren’t footing the bill as companies rapidly build out data centers to support a boom in energy-intensive AI technology.
Trump said that data center developers have “developed a little bit of bad publicity” as communities across the country resist the buildout of the structures.
“They need some PR help,” Trump said. “People think if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up, and that’s not happening. It’s not going to happen. And for the areas where it did happen, it won’t happen anymore.”
Last year, the White House largely focused on policies that promoted the swift development of artificial intelligence, advancing the agenda of tech investors and executives seeking to cash in on a potential AI gold rush. The policies, including a December executive order that sought to limit state regulation of the technology, have emerged as a divisive issue within Trump’s coalition, separating some in the MAGA base from Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley.
Under the pledge that Trump announced, companies said they would pay the full cost of energy resources by building or buying from new power plants. When possible, the companies also committed to add more capacity to serve the broader public. They will also voluntarily negotiate new, separate rate structures with utilities and state governments, a response to concerns that companies have often negotiated better rates than consumers.
The commitments could potentially slow down some multibillion-dollar initiatives to rapidly build data centers, wrote Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
“While this initiative alleviates a major headache from the Trump administration heading into a critical midterm election cycle, this creates a significant bottleneck with big tech organizations looking to build out large data center footprints quickly,” he wrote in a Wednesday note.
Trump’s Silicon Valley relationships carry political risk, as Democrats accuse the president of failing to keep his pledges to improve the economy and accuse him of prioritizing billionaire donors over his supporters.
At the event, Trump highlighted some of those relationships. He asked Gwynne Shotwell, the president of xAI parent company SpaceX, to say hello to “a very special person,” an apparent reference to Elon Musk, the principal owner of the space company, who served as a key adviser to Trump in the first six months of his administration. He also asked Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to say hello to his “friend.” Trump has regularly met with Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, the chairman of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post.
This year, the White House has sought to highlight the construction jobs that have been created by companies’ billion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence. Construction workers wearing hard hats sat in the audience Wednesday, drawing praise from Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin).
“You’re meshing the high tech with the hammers, putting the guys with the hard hats with the 100-pound brain nerds,” he said. “You’re not thinking about an election cycle, but thinking about the next generation.”
Trump, who frequently takes credit for the accomplishments of presidents who came before him, criticized former President Joe Biden for taking credit for policies that he created during his first term in office. He suggested that the presidents who follow him will benefit from the ratepayer protection pledge, but also suggested that consumers would feel its effects immediately.
The White House pledge comes after several companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, had announced their own commitments to reduce energy costs. Wednesday’s event expanded the commitments to a larger group of companies.
Anthropic, one of the country’s leading AI companies, was not in attendance, however, after the administration placedthe company on a national security blacklist last week following a dispute with the Pentagon.
Environmentalists criticized the pledge, warning that the buildout of data centers is increasing costs and pollution for communities across the country.
“More than a pledge, we urgently need strong policies and protections to ensure that data centers pay their way, disclose and mitigate their impacts, and are powered by clean energy,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.
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