The White House is preparing an event, expected within weeks, at which electric utilities, the companies that build and run data centres for Big Tech, and governors of the states hosting the biggest buildouts will be asked to promise that none of this will end up on household electricity bills.
Three people familiar with the plans described the initiative to Reuters. The guest list is still being finalised, and the mechanism, as before, is a voluntary pledge.
It extends a document the administration already has. In March, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at a White House ceremony, committing to fund the generation and grid upgrades their projects require rather than passing the cost to existing customers, including for capacity they reserve and do not use.
“President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge has been so impactful that additional stakeholders also want to sign it,” a White House official said, which is one reading of what is happening.
Another is that the original pledge covered the wrong companies. Hyperscalers do not set retail tariffs. Utilities and state regulators do, and if the political objective is to keep bills flat, the signatures that matter are theirs.
