White House expands pledge to keep electric bills from skyrocketing amid data center boom

(TNND) — More data center developers and others are jumping on board with the Trump administration’s efforts to protect everyday Americans from shouldering higher electricity rates from the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The administration announced that more than 200 additional utilities, data center developers, cooperatives, and states have signed on to its Ratepayer Protection Pledge.

The technology companies and developers are making voluntary pledges to build and pay for the increased electricity production they need.

Trump gave an update Thursday to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which was unveiled in early March with commitments from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI.

“With the Trump administration’s Ratepayer Protection plan, the American innovators and consumers thrive to win together, because we’re insisting that AI data centers and big tech companies pay their own way,” Trump said at an event. “And that’s what they’re doing. And they’re happy to do it, because this way, they’re going to be able to function and function brilliantly. They’re going to have a lot of electricity left over, and they’ll put that into the grid. So, we’ll actually end up with more electricity. The rates are going to go down. And as president, I’ve always said that America’s goal must be to dominate the future. And that includes being the No. 1 superpower in artificial intelligence.”

The White House said the Ratepayer Protection Pledge now covers 80% of power delivered to American homes and businesses. And the administration said the plan protects 263 million Americans when a data center is built nearby.

For example, the White House pointed to a deal between Entergy and Amazon in Mississippi that’s supposed to generate roughly $2 billion in total customer benefits, including full coverage of new transmission and related costs.

And in Michigan, the White House said DTE Energy’s agreements with Google and Oracle should produce billions in customer savings, with the tech companies covering their full energy and capacity costs.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who researches the digital economy, said data center developers have been seeing the backlash at the local level for a while. But the Ratepayer Protection Pledge amplifies those concerns on a national scale.

Muro said the White House’s plan can help American households, even if he doesn’t see it as breaking new ground.

Muro said some of the big tech companies were already taking steps, before the White House stepped in, to shield nearby residents from higher power bills when they build a data center.

Microsoft, for example, released a multipoint plan back in January for “community first” AI development in which the company said it would pay its way to ensure data centers don’t increase power bills for other customers.

But Muro said the “volume has really been turned up lately” over the data center concerns.

“It really makes clear how broad and bipartisan and shared across blue places and red places is the backlash against these centers,” Muro said.

Data centers are power hungry, and that’s caused concerns among everyday utility customers who fear the increased demand is increasing their monthly bills.

Hannah Wiseman, a professor of law at Penn State who focuses on energy law and related matters, said in a recent Q&A that a large data center can use the same amount of electricity as that of a small or medium-sized city, or around 80,000 houses.

Bloomberg News analysis published last fall found that electricity costs increased as much as 267% over the previous five years in places near significant data center activity.

By comparison, the overall price of electricity has increased about 38% over the last five years in the U.S., according to the government’s consumer price index.

And a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy found that domestic energy usage from data centers is expected to double or triple by 2028.

More of these energy-chugging data centers are coming online across the country.

Data from Aterio shows there are already over 2,000 data centers operating in the U.S., with nearly 800 more under construction and nearly 4,000 more announced.

CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, recently said the data center market set records across nearly every major indicator last year. And it said today’s titans of technology have embarked on an AI build-out that could eclipse the railroad expansion of the 1850s in relative scale.

Muro, who co-authored research earlier this year on how local communities can take advantage of the data center boom to foster long-term economic benefits, said ample energy is a bottleneck for data centers at the moment. But he’s expecting the power supply to improve over the coming years.