Trump says nearly 200 firms have signed pledge to protect Americans from costs arising from datacenters | Donald Trump
Donald Trump announced that nearly 200 organizations have signed the non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” expanding a purportedly voluntary pledge that U.S. consumers would not bear the cost of building an AI data center.
Trump made remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters on Thursday, along with the agency’s administrator Lee Zeldin and energy secretary Chris Wright. Other attendees included governors who signed the pledge, including Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Utah’s Spencer Cox and Louisiana’s Jeff Landry.
First announced in March, the pledge was initially signed by seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon. It will now include companies that provide 80 percent of all electricity to U.S. homes and businesses, according to the White House.
“We kept interest rates too low,” Trump said.
Twenty-three Republican governors have signed on to the program, along with major utilities such as Nextera and Duke Energy, data center developers and electric cooperatives, Trump announced Thursday.
“Electricity rates for 80 percent of the electricity distributed in America are currently controlled by the plan,” Trump said at the press conference.
The announcement comes amid growing backlash against the AI boom and the data centers that support it, as electricity bills soar ahead of November’s midterm elections. In June, public services prices increased by 4% on an annual basis. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.
On Thursday, Trump said it was “radical left communists” who “want to stop all new developments, kill our most successful industries, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and cede the AI race to China.”
But opposition to data centers has become a bipartisan issue, with voters concerned not just about utility rates but also the environmental and social impacts of artificial intelligence.
More than a dozen states have considered imposing a moratorium on data centers, with New York this month becoming the first US state to enact a temporary ban. Senator Bernie Sanders and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also proposed a national moratorium. And on Thursday, Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called for a ban on data center development in rural Texas; He is among the governors who have now made the commitment.
The commitment “will ensure that everyone involved in building and reinforcing data centers covers their own costs rather than passing them on to American families,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Guardian.
“The president’s bold action solidifies America’s dominance in the global AI race while transforming data centers into growth engines for local communities,” Rogers said.
Green groups were largely unimpressed by the non-binding pledge.
“The American people don’t care about weak promises and empty promises; they need relief from rising energy bills every month and real action to pay these companies their fair share and reduce high costs,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director for the Sierra Club, a national environmental advocacy organization. “Today’s pledge is a paper commitment to families struggling to keep the lights on as bills skyrocket. The companies that signed the agreement have done nothing to show they are working on how to cut costs.”
Lena Moffitt, executive director of the climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action, called Trump’s announcement a “big tech photo op” that “will not lower a single family’s electric bill.”
“Trump has repeatedly promised to lower Americans’ energy costs, but instead has allowed the same companies that are driving demand to write their own rules — a voluntary commitment that is toothless and carries no consequences if they violate it,” he said.
