Trump expands voluntary pledge to limit data-center electricity costs
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President Trump announced that additional governors, utilities and data-center developers have joined a non-binding pledge to keep electricity rates for households and businesses from rising due to AI-driven data-center expansion.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that nearly 200 new stakeholders, including utilities, data-center developers and 23 Republican governors, have signed a voluntary "Ratepayer Protection" pledge aimed at preventing higher electricity bills for U.S. consumers as AI-related data-center construction expands. The administration claims the pledge, which covers about 80% of power delivered to households and businesses, will create a surplus of electricity that can be fed back into the grid, allowing rates to fall.
Trump told reporters at the Environmental Protection Agency that "electricity bills for American families will actually come down" and emphasized the strategic importance of AI, noting that "AI is probably the biggest thing anybody’s ever seen, and whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period."
The White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said the nation’s largest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, has not yet adopted a bipartisan statement of principles linked to the pledge and urged the operator to reform its stakeholder process and board governance.
State officials have taken varied actions on the issue. New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a one-year moratorium on large server-warehouse construction, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation to prevent utilities from passing data-center energy costs to residential and small-business customers. In Texas, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa criticized data-center ownership, describing the sector as "the Wild West of data centers."
Industry groups, including Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon, have pledged not to shift electricity costs to ratepayers, though some tech companies continue to oppose state-level measures that would require them to fund grid upgrades. A bipartisan bill in the House Energy and Commerce Committee would formalize the pledge into law, mandating that data centers bear the costs of any necessary power-system improvements.
Analysts at consulting firm ICF project that electricity demand from data centers could raise utility bills by 15% to 40% by 2030 if unaddressed, underscoring the ongoing debate over the sector’s impact on consumers and the broader economy.