White House expands data center electricity cost pledge to utilities, states

The White House is expanding a voluntary pledge aimed at mitigating the electricity cost impacts of data centers to utilities and state governors.

A White House official confirmed to The Hill Wednesday that president Trump is set to announce Thursday that major utilities including Nextera and Duke Energy will be joining the pledge.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration said that it was seeking agreements with Big Tech companies that they would pay for increased power costs in areas where they build new data centers. 

It says that the pledge was already signed by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon.

Now, the White House says that nearly 200 additional entities including utilities, data center developers, electricity co-ops and public power sources and state governors have signed on.

The White House says that the pledge will now cover 80 percent of the power delivered to U.S. homes and businesses.

The expansion was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“President Trump is expanding the Ratepayer Protection Pledge to governors, legislators, developers, and power providers to ensure everyone involved in building and powering data centers covers their own costs instead of passing them on to American families,” said White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers in a written statement. 

“The President’s bold action is turning data centers into engines of growth for local communities, while cementing America’s dominance in the global AI race,” Rogers said.

In March, Trump issued a proclamation on the pledge which said that AI companies “will build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their energy demands, and pay for all new power delivery infrastructure upgrades to service their data centers.”

It also said that the companies will negotiate their own rate structures with utilities and state governments.

Trump is slated to announce the additional signatories at an event on Thursday, where he will be joined by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and four Republican governors who have signed the pledge: Louisiana’s Jeff Landry,  Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Nebraska’s Jim Pillen and Idaho’s Brad Little.

While on the campaign trail, Trump said he would cut energy and electric prices in half within 18 months. However, factors including the data center buildout are contributing to rising prices. 

Electricity prices were up 4 percent year-over-year in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Democrats and many Republicans say that AI data centers’ electricity demand is a problem, but there are both interparty and intra-party disagreements on the solution.

Notably, New York recently imposed a moratorium of up to one year on construction of new large data centers while it puts together a regulatory framework.

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