Artificial intelligence company executives trekked to Washington on Wednesday to meet with President Trump, pledging to cover the staggering costs of the energy needed to power the technology amid concerns about rising electricity prices.
At a White House round table, Mr. Trump announced that tech companies including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI had committed to pay for the power plants and grid upgrades needed to fuel their A.I. data centers, which can consume as much energy as a small city.
“This agreement will ensure that America can maintain the most advanced A.I. infrastructure on the planet without American families being forced to pick up the tab,” Mr. Trump said.
The president and his administration are confronting concerns about the effect of A.I. on the economy before the midterm elections this fall. Communities around the country have grown worried that electricity prices will rise for consumers as A.I. companies build more data centers, which house racks of electricity-hungry servers to run products like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Power prices have already proved a potent political issue. Democrats flipped two seats on Georgia’s utility commission last year by homing in on the cost of electricity, and tech companies are pouring money into ads and political campaigns to try to persuade the electorate to back the rapid expansion of A.I., including data centers.
Mr. Trump has been a major booster of A.I., which he has said is vital to winning a technology race with China. He has declared the manufacturing of data centers a priority and lifted a ban on exports of A.I.-related chips to China.
Last year, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing the government to put few limitations on tech companies that build the technology. He and top administration officials reiterated those ambitions on Wednesday, saying America must lead in A.I.
Still, the president has faced increasing pressure from voters concerned about high costs of living across the board. Last week, during his State of the Union address, he said he would tell tech companies to provide for their own power needs to ensure that “no one’s prices will go up.”
The White House said the “ratepayer protection pledge” signed by the companies on Wednesday made good on that promise.
“They need some P.R. help, because people think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up,” Mr. Trump said during the round table. “And that’s not happening — that’s not going to happen — and for the areas where it did happen, it won’t happen anymore.”
Under the White House pledge, the companies promised to secure power for their own data centers. They also pledged to negotiate their own rate structures with utilities and to pay for the cost of the power they ask for whether they end up using it or not.
In remarks on Wednesday, executives painted their industry as a partner to both Mr. Trump and communities where data centers are being built.
“We’re committed not only to pay for 100 percent of the energy we use but, very importantly, the infrastructure to support that growth, whether or not we end up using that energy,” said Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google.
Meta’s president, Dina Powell McCormick, praised a company pilot program to train fiber technicians to help build data centers and offer the trainees jobs at the company.
Executives from Oracle, xAI and Microsoft also attended.
The administration acknowledged that the companies were formalizing their commitment to the kind of measures that they were already starting to adopt. Many tech companies have said they are willing to pay higher rates. Microsoft and Anthropic have publicly pledged to cover the cost of the electricity they use.
But voluntary pledges can go only so far on their own. The complex details of how to divide up costs for all the energy infrastructure needed to power data centers are typically set at the state and local levels between utilities and state regulators — not by the White House. And while many governors and state legislators agree that data centers should pay more, there are often heated debates about how best to do that.
Administration officials told reporters on Wednesday that companies were likely to keep their promises because they often needed government approval for data center projects and that state regulators could enforce violations of the deals the companies reached with their utilities.
Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
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