The White House wants AI companies to pay higher prices. Many have already said they will.

The proliferation of AI data centers feeding into the national electricity grid has helped drive up consumer electricity prices, raising global electricity prices by more than 6% in the past year.

That doesn’t bode well for this fall’s election candidates, and President Donald Trump addressed the challenge in his State of the Union address last night.

“We’re telling the big tech companies that they have a responsibility to secure their own energy,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that there will be no increase in prices for anyone.”

The hyperscaler in question does not need to be specified. They have already made public commitments in recent weeks to finance electricity by building their own power sources, paying higher prices, or both, part of a larger effort to solve PR problems around the growth of the data center and defeat the skeptics.

On January 11, Microsoft he announced its order “to ensure that the cost of electricity to serve our datacenters is not passed on to residential customers.” January 26, OpenAI he volunteered to “pay its own way on electricity, so that our services do not increase electricity prices.” On February 11, Anthropic created the same promise “Covering electricity prices that consumers experience from our data centers.” Yesterday, Google he announced the world’s largest battery project yesterday to power a data center in Minnesota.

What these promises mean in practice, and who will know which data centers are responsible for the higher costs, remains unclear. The White House did not respond to questions about the policy from TechCrunch.

“A handshake deal with Big Tech on data rates is not enough,” Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly said. he said on social media. “Americans need assurances that energy prices will not go up and communities will have a say.”

White House Press Secretary Taylor Rodgers he said that next week, the companies will send representatives to sign the pledge at the White House. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI are said to be among those expected to participate. However, none of the companies have confirmed their availability.

Even if technology companies are committed to cost-effectiveness, on-site power plants may not be the solution – they can have negative effects on electricity. surrounding areaand will focus on gas supply chains, turbines, photovoltaics and batteries, depending on how companies want to use their computers.