Tech giants are signing up to Trump’s promise to provide their own AI data centers

At a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday, executives from seven major corporations signed a pledge with President Trump to provide their forces with intelligence data centers.

Leaders from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI endorsed the “taxpayer protection pledge” that Trump first announced during last week’s State of the Union address. The president said the program will help protect residents from high electricity costs in areas where AI data centers are being built.

AI data centers currently consume about 4% to 6% of electricity in the US but that number is expected to increase to 12% by 2028.

“Under this new agreement, Big Tech companies are committed to fully cover the cost of the increased power generation required for AI data centers,” the president said Wednesday. “Prices in communities will not go up, but in many cases they will go down, and a lot.”

Affordability becomes an important issue for voters. While Trump has ordered an increase in domestic fuel production including oil, gas and coal, residential electricity bills have been rising — from an average of 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour in January 2025 to 17.2 cents by the end of December, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Experts on both sides of politics say this issue could cause negative results for Republicans in the mid-term elections this November. Last year, Democratic candidates won key races in New Jersey and Virginia after campaigning heavily on affordability.

The pledge signed on Wednesday is voluntary and it is not clear how the companies will get the power.

Companies agree to build, deliver or buy new power plants to include their data. They will also pay for the development of equipment needed to operate the data centers, which White House officials said will bring benefits to neighboring communities, as well as local investments such as the creation of jobs in the construction and operation of the data center.

“We as administrators are using every tool at our disposal to ensure that the US can build and maintain the largest, most powerful and most advanced AI infrastructure anywhere in the world, and today, we recognize that building the future requires a credible superpower,” said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Under the promise, companies will negotiate different rate structures and utilities with state governments, and commit to paying whether they use the electricity or not. In addition, companies will work with grid operators to make their backup power available during blackouts or times of grid stress.

Many technology firms are already moving in this direction, Google, Meta, Amazon and others are increasingly acquiring the dedicated power of their AI data centers.

The pledge “reaffirms our long-standing commitment to protecting energy access to American homes, accelerating progress to secure America’s energy future, and delivering energy infrastructure — all of which are critical to maintaining America’s global leadership in this era of innovation,” Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said “the pledge to protect taxpayers marks a milestone as a national commitment to a strong grid that supports American families, fuels our economy, and keeps the United States at the forefront of global innovation.” However, he added that more bipartisan cooperation is needed at the state, local and federal levels to unlock private sector investment to address America’s aging electric grid, outdated permitting processes and federal delays.

Experts noted that the agreement does not prevent companies from using fossil fuels to meet the growing demand for electricity. Although most of the signatories of the pledge have their commitments to renewable energy and invest heavily in wind, solar and battery storage, in reality the mix is ​​often mixed, renewables are supplemented by agreements to purchase nuclear power or natural gas to ensure reliability from hour to hour.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has previously advocated the use of fossil fuels to power AI data centers, including natural gas, coal and diesel. Fossil fuel emissions not only contribute to global warming but also contribute to local air pollution.

Wright on Wednesday criticized Biden-era clean energy policies, which he said were overly burdensome and would have pushed data center companies overseas. He vowed that “we will see a decrease in the price of electricity during this administration.”

But current trends are going in the opposite direction. While the president promised to cut energy costs in half, they have instead risen faster than inflation in many parts of the country, said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University who previously served as the top energy official in the Biden administration.

“It is important to check the actions of the managers, rather than checking the promises of the managers,” said Samaras. He noted that Trump is blocking the construction of clean energy as demand rises, including canceling subsidies for integrated solar systems and trying to halt construction of onshore wind projects nearing completion on the East Coast.

“To ensure that prices do not continue to rise due to the growing demand for artificial intelligence, we need to add more clean energy to the grid,” said Samaras. “We need to reinvest in our transmission and distribution infrastructure, and we need to make sure that companies are bringing clean energy and infrastructure to the table when they come to communities.”

Trevor Higgins, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, criticized the pledge as “a vague and pointless effort that fails to provide taxpayers with any guaranteed protection against rising resource levels.”

“Unless all data centers are required to pay their fair share of their energy costs, companies can retreat or hide the true impacts of data center development,” Higgins said. “And if the Trump administration continues to block fast, clean energy from being put on the grid, it will force data centers to use dirty, expensive coal and gas plants in communities across the country.”

The latest voting from the nonprofit group Climate Power and the analytics firm Blue Rose Research show that Americans are concerned about how data centers are powered. 53 percent of respondents said they would support the construction of data centers powered by clean energy sources like wind and solar, compared to only 31 percent who said they would support those that use electricity like coal or natural gas.