White House urges AI firms to shoulder rising electricity costs as most already agree

The rapid growth of AI data centres connected to the U.S. electrical grid has been linked to higher consumer power bills, pushing the average national electricity price up by more than 6% over the past year.

That kind of jump is politically sensitive heading into this fall’s elections, and President Donald Trump addressed the issue during his State of the Union speech last night.

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up.”

But the biggest AI and cloud players don’t appear to need much urging. In recent weeks, multiple hyperscalers have announced public commitments to cover electricity-related costs themselves, eitherby building dedicated power sources, agreeing to pay higher rates, or a combination of both. The pledges are part of a broader push to reduce public backlash against data centre expansion and to reassure communities that new facilities won’t increase household energy bills.

On January 11, Microsoft announced a policy “to ensure that the electricity cost of serving our datacenters is not passed on to residential customers.” On January 26, OpenAI said it would commit to “paying its own way on energy, so that our operations don’t increase your energy prices.” On February 11, Anthropic made a similar promise to “cover electricity price increases that consumers face from our data centres.” And yesterday, Google announced what it described as the largest battery project in the world to support a data centre in Minnesota.

What these commitments will actually require in practice — and who will decide which data centres are responsible for specific price increases — remains unclear. The White House has not yet released the text of the pledge it is proposing.

“A handshake agreement with Big Tech over data centre costs isn’t good enough,” Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly wrote on social media. “Americans need a guarantee that energy prices won’t soar and communities have a say.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rodgers said companies will send representatives next week to sign the pledge at the White House formally. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI are reportedly among the firms expected to attend, though none has confirmed participation.

Even if major tech companies do take on these electricity costs directly, building on-site power plants may not be a cure-all. Such projects can still create environmental concerns for nearby areas. They could strain supply chains for natural gas, turbines, photovoltaics, and batteries, depending on how each company chooses to power its computing infrastructure.