The growing backlash to data centers, and the rising electricity bills that accompany them, has become difficult for politicians to ignore.
President Donald Trump is now the latest to address the issue. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump announced what he called a “ratepayer protection pledge,” for which the White House will tell “major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs.”
“We have an old grid,” Trump said. “It could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that’s needed.”
Under the agreement, tech companies can build their own power plants, which Trump says will protect community electricity prices from going up. “In many cases,” he added, “prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down.”
Another empty promise?
To climate experts, though, that pledge sounds like another empty promise from the president, just like his campaign vow to reduce Americans’ utility costs.
One of Trump’s key campaign promises was to slash Americans’ energy bills in half within the first year of his presidency.
But in reality, electricity bills rose 13% nationally by the end of 2025, according to Climate Power, a climate advocacy organization.
That hike hasn’t been entirely because of the AI-driven data center boom. Bills rose in part because the Trump administration has canceled clean energy projects like wind and solar and instead made the country more dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels.
Those efforts will only exacerbate the energy costs associated with data centers. Wind and solar power are cheaper than coal and natural gas for utility-scale electricity—but as data centers demand more and more power, the country is building more natural gas power plants.
“If Trump and Republicans were serious about lowering costs, they’d focus on bringing more made in America clean energy onto the grid,” Climate Power senior advisor Jesse Lee said in a statement following the State of the Union. “Instead, they’re trying to ban it.”
Data centers becoming a political issue
Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge is the latest version of a data center solution that has been growing in popularity.
As they face increased backlash, with communities opposing data center projects in their backyards, some tech companies like Anthropic have taken it upon themselves to promise to pay for their increased energy use.
Politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are also increasingly calling for fixes.
In November 2025, Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing on rising electricity bills during her campaign. She specifically called out data centers, saying she’ll make sure they pay “their own way and their fair share” of their new electricity and transmission needs.
More recently, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill this month to stop data centers from driving up energy costs by requiring them to have their own power sources.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders just this week went for a more extreme solution, calling for a moratorium on data center construction.
It’s not clear if these efforts will do anything to stem the rising costs for all the data centers already planned or in the works, though—which would add a total of 93 GW of electricity demand to the grid by 2029.
Already in response to that demand, proposals for new natural gas plants are soaring, tripling in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to nonprofit research organization Global Energy Monitor.
The U.S. now has the most gas-fired power capacity in development (that includes projects that have been announced as well as those in preconstruction and/or construction), the nonprofit says—with more than a third of that capacity slated to directly power data centers.
