<2>Big Tech Companies Agree to Not Ruin Your Electric Bill with AI Data Centers
<3>The White House Announces Ratepayer Protection Pledge
<4>Today, the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers.
<5>Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google, and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.
<6>The main provisions of the federal pledge have tech companies agreeing to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources.” It also claims they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the business uses that electricity.
<7>The pledge doesn’t