Leading tech executives met at the White House on Wednesday to promise to shoulder more of their data centers’ energy costs, but many of the real solutions are out of the Trump administration’s hands.
Executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI signed a “ratepayer protection pledge,” which Trump said will have “a tremendous impact on electricity costs.” The pledge doesn’t include any specific new policies to help tech companies finance or build new energy projects. It will ultimately fall to state and local regulators to continue hammering out the specific rate structures that will induce greater investment in the grid near data centers, and power project developers will still contend with years-long backlogs for gas turbines and other necessary equipment.
Still, for tech companies that are keen to avoid conflict with the administration, the pledge will likely produce some tangible results, Jeff Jakubiak, energy regulation partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, told Semafor: “I think is going to result in more generation than otherwise would have been built.”
