More than 200 companies and politicians, including some of the country’s largest utilities, have signed a voluntary pledge to prevent A.I. data centers from driving up electricity costs for millions of Americans, President Trump said on Thursday.
The pledge is largely symbolic, and experts have said it could be difficult to enforce because power prices are often determined by state regulators. But it underscored the extent to which rising energy bills have become a top concern for voters — and a potential liability for Republicans — ahead of the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump first announced the initiative, which he called a “ratepayer protection pledge,” during his State of the Union speech in February. The following month, the White House secured promises from tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to pay a greater share of the enormous costs associated with delivering electricity to new data centers.
During an event at the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, Mr. Trump said the pledge had attracted new signatories including utilities like NextEra Energy, Southern Company and Duke Energy that supply electricity to millions of households.
“We know that the data centers and A.I. are dramatically increasing the demand for electricity,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s only fair that the cost of building the new infrastructure to meet this demand should be borne by the corporations themselves, not by the American consumers and the American patriots.”
In addition to the utilities, the new signatories include major data center developers like Equinix and Digital Realty. Twenty-three Republican governors also signed on.
The White House did not reach out to Democratic governors about joining the pledge or attending Thursday’s event, according to three people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
No Democratic governors have signed the Trump administration pledge. Many Democratic governors have announced their own plans to prevent data centers from increasing energy costs in their states.
Mr. Trump has been a major booster of artificial intelligence, which he has said is essential to winning the technology race against China. The E.P.A. has taken several steps to make it easier to build data centers, such as loosening limits on smog-causing pollution from the gas turbines that often power the facilities.
Many communities around the country have begun strongly opposing the behemoth projects. A recent Gallup poll found that Democrats and Republicans alike would oppose the construction of a data center in their neighborhood, with many citing concerns about the potential noise, pollution and energy and water usage.
“They need some P.R. help,” Mr. Trump said of tech companies in March, when he initially announced his ratepayer-protection pledge.
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New York last week became the first state to enact a moratorium on new data centers. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, signed an executive order pausing the construction of the largest data centers for one year while the state assesses their energy use and effects on the environment. More than a dozen other states have considered similar action, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump made the case that communities would benefit from accepting data centers. He noted that teachers in Richland Parish, La., recently received $50,000 bonuses as a result of an increase in sales tax revenue generated by a Meta data center under construction. Other utilities have claimed that lucrative data center deals have allowed them to lower rates for other customers.
“You have communities that really want the data centers, and frankly, those are the smart communities because it means tremendous numbers of jobs and very little actual disruption,” Mr. Trump said.
He said that people opposed to data centers were “radical left communists” who “would not lower your electricity bills. But they would actually increase them very substantially because you wouldn’t have this money pouring in.”
While Mr. Trump campaigned on a pledge to cut power prices in half, average U.S. residential electricity rates have risen nearly 18 percent since he returned to office, according to the most recent available data from the federal government.
While data centers aren’t primarily responsible for the increase in electricity prices, they do have the potential to push up costs in some places, experts said.
Many of the giant facilities being built to train cutting-edge A.I. models need as much electricity as a small city. That means they can require billions of dollars’ worth of new power plants, transmission lines and other upgrades to connect to the local grid.
If the electric bills paid by data centers don’t cover all those costs, other customers have to make up the shortfall. Demand from data centers can also outstrip supply, driving up prices.
At PJM Interconnection, which as the nation’s largest grid serves 65 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, wholesale electric capacity prices have skyrocketed in recent years, leading to rising bills in places like Maryland and Pennsylvania. Some analyses have blamed those increases on a surge of new data centers arriving just as older power plants are retiring.
Across the country, elected leaders have tried to get the companies behind data centers to pay more for electricity. But doing so can often be difficult in practice.
Under Mr. Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge, tech companies have said they would willingly pay higher rates to cover any power plants or grid upgrades needed for their data centers. Yet many of those details are determined by complex rules set by state regulators, local utilities and regional grid operators. And it’s hard to track how well the pledges have translated into changes on the ground.
“The pledges are clearly symbolic and a lot of theater,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “What matters is what actually happens at the utility level.”
The White House has urged PJM to devise a plan that would allow data centers to pay for new power plants in the region. But PJM is still haggling with companies and state regulators and the plan remains in limbo.
Increasingly, many tech companies are also building and paying for their own off-grid power plants, largely fueled by natural gas, as Meta is doing with a data center in El Paso, Texas. Mr. Trump has encouraged those efforts, which have less of an effect on the grid, although they can add to air pollution.
In a recent interview with CBS News, Gov. Hochul questioned whether the companies that signed Mr. Trump’s pledge would follow through on their promises. “Asking these companies to keep their word on how much they’re going to consume — I’m more realistic than that perhaps,” she said.
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