By Jarrett Renshaw and Laila Kearney
Feb 25 (Reuters) – The White House said on Wednesday it will host leading data center and artificial intelligence companies next week, with attendees expected to include Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic and Meta Platforms to formalize a deal to shield consumers from rising power costs.
The meeting, scheduled for March 4 and first reported by Reuters, is expected to advance an initiative President Donald Trump unveiled during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Trump said he had told major technology firms they must build their own power plants to run the rapidly expanding fleet of data centers and other artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The pledge under discussion is expected to resemble commitments offered earlier this year by Microsoft to invest in new electricity generation and efficiency measures.
“Major tech companies will join President Trump at the White House next week to formally sign the Rate Payer Protection Pledge that he announced during his historic State of the Union address,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.
HIGH POWER PRICES MAY BE A VULNERABILITY
The Trump administration supports efforts to advance artificial intelligence in competition with China, but the impact of the proliferation of AI data centers on power prices has become a potential vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections.
Microsoft did not say whether it would attend next week or sign any new pledge. “We appreciate the Administration’s work to ensure that data centers don’t contribute to higher electricity prices for consumers,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company planned to attend the meeting and participate in the effort.
A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.
“American families shouldn’t pick up the tab for AI,” Anthropic spokesperson Sarah Heck wrote on X. “In support of the (White House) rate payer protection pledge, Anthropic has committed to covering 100% of electricity price increases that consumers face from our data centers.”
AI RACE A FOCUS FOR TRUMP
Trump has made the global AI race, and securing the vast amounts of electricity needed to power it, a primary focus of his second term. That agenda, however, has become politically precarious ahead of the midterms as energy demand growth from data centers inflates power bills across much of the country.
The proliferation of giant data center projects has met with increasing local and state protests over concerns of rising bills and pollution. Some data center plans, or related power projects, have been cancelled or postponed following local opposition.
Last month, the Trump administration and several governors from states in the country’s largest electric grid, PJM Interconnection, released a framework for addressing surging power bills in the region.
PJM covers the world’s biggest concentration of data centers. Projections for a massive increase in the number of centers connecting to the grid have led some power costs in the market to surge by about 1,000% in less than two years.
Part of the White House plan to rein in power costs tied to data centers will build on the PJM framework, two sources told Reuters.
Addressing rising costs from data centers is complicated, and the pledges are no easy way to rein in prices at a time of ballooning data center demand and utility spending, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program.
“The ‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ is meaningless until we see utilities file contracts with state and federal regulators that allocate all costs of serving data centers to data centers,” Peskoe said.
That effort will be particularly difficult in PJM, Peskoe said, where utilities are already spending tens of billions of dollars on power projects to supply data centers – costs that will be spread out among the 13-state grid’s ratepayers.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney and Jarrett Renshaw; additional reporting by Greg Bensinger; editing by Timothy Gardner, Rod Nickel)
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