At yesterday’s State of the Union address, President Trump brought up the issue of surging power costs driven by hyper-scale AI buildouts — and proposed a solution. Announcing a new “ ratepayer protection pledge ,” he said companies would now be required to build their own power plants for data centers, generating and supplying their own electricity for AI workloads.

For the past few years, Big Tech has relied on thirsty data centers to fuel the AI boom, building massive sites running thousands of GPUs at once. These chips not only require energy themselves but also need to be kept cool, which adds to the overall power needs. So far, these companies have just been just plugging into the grid and buy electricity conventionally, but this has stretched the grid thin .

Now, for everyone else in the area, power has become more expensive because their locality is pulling harder from the network. "We have an old grid. It could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that's needed," said Trump. Last year, a report claimed that energy prices have already risen by up to 36% in some states, while another pointed toward the situation getting worse.

Data centers are said to account for 12% of the total power in the national grid by 2028, up from just 4% back in 2018. This drastically affects the average person, who is forced to pay more for the same household power usage and whose backyard is now a perpetually-humming living being — while the corporations actually behind this surge remain much more shielded against the price hikes.

To combat this, Washington's new plan is to ask these companies to fuel their AI ambitions by themselves. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told CNBC that "under this bold initiative, these massive companies will build, bring, or buy their own power supply for new AI data centers, ensuring that Americans’ electricity bills will not increase as demand grows."

This pledge will reportedly be signed by Amazon , Google , Meta, Microsoft , xAI, Oracle, OpenAI, and others when they visit the President in early March. Trump already unveiled the idea last month via a Truth Social post, where he ensured that Americans won't have to "pick up the tab" for data center buildouts.

The Trump administration has been very aggressive on the AI front in order to deter China from gaining an upper hand. The two countries were engaged in a deadlock for most of past year over the latest AI GPUs, before things cooled down with a temporary trade truce . Hence, the government is maintaining a delicate balance between encouraging hyperscalers to... scale while simultaneously keeping them in check.

"I'm telling them, they can build their own plant. They're going to produce their own electricity. It will ensure the company's ability to get electricity, while at the same time, lowering prices of electricity for you," said Trump at the SOTU address. Now, it's only a matter of time before this "ratepayer protection pledge" is formalized, but broader reaction from concerned critics will be predicated on actual, real-world impact.

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