Big Tech Leaders Sign Trump’s Nonbinding Pledge to Address Data Center Fallout

Big tech executives met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday to sign a nonbinding pledge to address consumers’ growing concerns about electricity price hikes amid the nationwide data center boom.

The White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge calls on tech companies to generate the energy required by their data centers, pay for the infrastructure upgrades necessary to increase the electricity grid’s capacity, negotiate rates with utility companies and hire local labor to help the local economy, Michael Kratsios, Trump’s lead science and technology adviser, told reporters ahead of the meeting.

“Data centers, they developed a little bit of a bad … they need some PR help, because people think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up,” Trump said Wednesday.

Executives from Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon joined Trump at the White House to sign the pledge. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the administration’s lead AI adviser David Sacks were also present at the event.

“The next three years in many ways, sir, are the whole game, and those three years, while you are president, you have positioned us to win,” Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, who is married to Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, told Trump.

The meeting is the clearest example yet of the Trump administration acknowledging the backlash around data centers — an issue that’s proving to be political liability for Republican lawmakers as well as an obstacle to the technology sector.

Trump encouraged the tech companies to use fossil fuels to generate the power needed for new data centers instead of renewable energy alternatives.

“This new strategy, never tried before in any country, will pave the way for continued American dominance in energy and technology working together,” Trump said. “Don’t worry about wind. Forget it. It’s worthless.”

This is not the first time the White House has tried to address growing concerns around the booming artificial intelligence industry and its need for more data centers. In January, Democratic Govs. Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro backed a Trump plan to slow rising electricity prices in the nation’s largest grid region.

Many of the companies that signed the pledge Wednesday, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have already committed to covering the power consumption costs of their data centers in response to local backlash.

And other companies, like Amazon and Meta, already have agreements with local governments to tackle infrastructure upgrades required to connect their data centers to the grid, often in exchange for tax benefits.

Still, the White House said this new pledge would encourage more action from the industry.

“We are challenging these companies to think bigger when it comes to data center construction, identifying ways this infrastructure can drive down overall electricity costs,” Kratsios told reporters Wednesday.

Environmental groups say the pledge is too small in scope to address the economic and environmental concerns associated with data centers.

It’s “completely toothless and unenforceable,” said Jesse Lee, a senior adviser at Climate Power.

Technology companies have spent billions of dollars to build massive data center facilities across the country that in some cases consume as much energy as entire cities to power the computing demands of AI training and modern digital infrastructure.

The industry could spend trillions of dollars in building these data centers before the end of the decade as demand for compute power increases, according to McKinsey and Company projections.

Grassroots opposition has erupted on the local level, prompting scrutiny from state and federal officials. State legislators in Oklahoma, New York, Maryland and Michigan are debating legislation to temporarily pause the construction of new data centers.

In Congress, Sen. Chris Van Hollen has introduced legislation that would force data center developers to pay for the power needs they impose on regional energy grids and protect consumers from paying more in their electricity bills. Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a moratorium on data center construction all together.

The White House said it prefers that any federal action around data centers remain at the executive level.

“We view it as a much more practical way to achieve the same ends. Legislation is slow-moving and it’s a very blunt tool, and of course, it doesn’t foresee what’s coming next and what’s going to happen,” a White House official, who requested anonymity on a press call, told reporters. “Legislation is just too rigid. There are different kinds of deals and different kinds of power markets.”