The Trump administration has called on big tech companies to keep energy costs down amid the data center boom.
President Donald Trump announced the nonbinding Ratepayer Protection Pledge during his State of the Union address.
“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump told the crowd.
Those companies include Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI. They pledged to pay for the energy infrastructure needed to power their data centers in order to not pass on costs to households — a big concern for voters.
Electricity costs could increase by an average of 8% nationally by 2030, according to a June analysis from Carnegie Mellon and North Carolina State universities.
The pledge also says, where possible, companies will add more energy capacity that serves the broader public, along with letting the public rely on their backup generators at “times of scarcity” to prevent blackouts.
“Trust is not given by communities and local stakeholders,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-Louisana, said in a press release. “It is built over time — and I think this pledge is a huge part of building that important foundation for the future.”
However, not everyone is as optimistic.
Jean Su, director and senior attorney of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it’s positive that the Trump administration is acknowledging the affordability problem but that the pledge holds little weight.
“There is no actual guarantee, no enforcement mechanism to actually make sure that big tech follows through on those promises and protects ratepayers,” Su said.
Su said she wants to see ratepayer protections mandated by law, along with limits on data center carbon emissions. While the new pledge also includes promises to train workers from the communities housing data centers, Su said it fails to address environmental impacts.
“It makes no pledges on actually stopping the diffusion of the carbon bomb that is underlying the entire AI tech boom,” Su said.
In many cases, the data center boom has resulted in new natural gas pipes being built or coal plants staying alive. Su points to a recent report from her nonprofit estimating that data centers will emit as much carbon by 2035 as the country of Italy.
This comes as the Trump administration streamlines permitting for oil, gas and coal to unleash American energy.
Communities around the country have instituted moratoriums on data center development, and Denver is considering joining the list. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, is proposing a nationwide moratorium on this kind of development.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
