President Donald Trump will announce during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night that his administration has struck agreements with major tech companies to make them shoulder a greater share of the energy cost burden associated with data centers.
The remarks come as the infrastructure build-out for artificial intelligence threatens to further tax the electric grid and raise electricity prices, an increasingly powerful talking point ahead of the midterm elections.
The new “rate payer protection pledges,” confirmed by a White House official ahead of the president’s address, represent one of the administration’s boldest actions yet related to AI and energy.
Trump is expected to announce that top tech companies have pledged to pay more for electricity in areas where they are building new data centers, which use enormous amounts of energy and sometimes water.
