Seven of the nation’s largest tech companies signed President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge on Wednesday, agreeing to cover the cost of all power needed to fuel their data centers.
The CEOs of Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI gathered at the White House to sign the pledge, which Trump first announced last week during his State of the Union address.
The companies agreed to negotiate dedicated power-rate deals with utilities and state governments, and to pay for the electricity and supporting infrastructure to power their data centers – even if they don’t ultimately use the power.
Notably, companies are also committed to adding more grid capacity that “serves the broader public by increasing supply.”
According to a White House fact sheet, the companies will also work with grid operators to make backup generation available during emergencies to reduce the risk of blackouts and bolster reliability.
“These measures will ensure that Americans are protected from higher energy prices, benefit from grid upgrades and increased grid resilience, and benefit from this technological boom while the United States continues its global leadership in innovation and advanced technology,” Trump wrote in a proclamation.
The pledge comes as rising energy costs become a national political issue. Last year, the Department of Energy warned that half of all new American electrical power will be consumed by artificial intelligence data centers by 2030 and that power supply will not meet demand.
Today, data centers use about 5% of total U.S. power generation. By 2030, they could consume 9%-17% of U.S. power generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
In Virginia, where EPRI noted data center demand is highest and could consume up to 50% of electricity by 2030, rising data center-related costs was a key voting issue in the state’s recent gubernatorial race.
Congressional Democrats have also spoken out about rising energy costs in their states, with Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., commenting in November that his own electrical bill has gone up due to data centers.
In remarks Wednesday at the White House, Trump said he believes that public opinion will shift following companies’ signing of the pledge.
“They need some PR help, because people think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up, and that’s … not going to happen,” Trump said.
“For the areas where it did happen won’t happen anymore, because they never had this alternative,” he added. “… some centers were rejected by communities on … [rising costs] and now I think it’s going to be just the opposite … they’re going to be getting a lot of excess electricity from the data centers where they build their own plants.”