White House is growing concerned about data center energy costs
The Trump administration appears to be growing concerned about how the proliferation of AI data centers across the country is raising the utility bills of many Americans, especially as affordability has arguably become the most important issue among voters.
With Republicans facing the prospect of suffering enough losses in November's midterm elections to shift the balance of power in Congress - and in turn put greater limits on President Trump's own powers - the White House is pushing Big Tech to address the impact their enormous energy usage has on the electric bills for Americans.
Peter Navarro, the manufacturing and trade adviser to Trump, told Fox News on Sunday that the White House might begin forcing tech companies to fully absorb the costs of the electricity they are using to power their AI data centers.
“All of these data center builders, Meta on down, need to pay for all, all of the costs,” Navarro said. “They need to pay, not only pay for the electricity that they’re using on the grid, but they have to pay for the resiliency that they’re affecting as well.”
He added that tech companies also "need to pay for the water" that's used for data centers.
"So there’s activity, action here going forward, where we force them to internalize the cost," Navarro said.
The issue of rapidly rising utility bills is one that could only grow more pronounced for the Trump administration as the demand for data centers continues to proliferate.
In a research note published last month, Goldman Sachs said that electricity prices in the US spiked 6.9% year over year in 2025, which was more than double the headline inflation rate of 2.9%. The analysts expect electricity prices to continue increasing through the end of the decade, with data centers accounting for 40% of the growth in electricity demand.
Goldman estimates that electricity prices will rise another 6% through 2027.
“The income and spending drags will likely be larger for lower-income households because electricity accounts for a greater share of their spending,” Goldman analyst Manuel Abecasis said.
While Navarro specifically called out Meta (META) in his interview on Sunday, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC that it already covers the costs of all its energy usage.
“Meta pays the full costs for energy used by our data centers so they aren’t passed onto consumers — and we go beyond that by paying for new and upgraded local infrastructure as well as adding new power to the grid,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Trump said in a Post on Truth Social in January that his administration had been working with Microsoft (MSFT) on the issue and the tech giant agreed that it "would make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t 'pick up the tab' for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills."
Politico also reported last week that the White House is working with some of the world's largest tech companies on a "compact" in which the companies agree to a commitment that "ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliability, and that the companies driving demand also carry the cost of building new infrastructure."
Nothing has been finalized and it's not yet known whether the companies - which reportedly include OpenAI, Microsoft, Google (GOOG), Meta, Amazon (AMZN) and other big AI players - will ultimately agree to it.
However, the Trump administration is eager to announce such an initiative "with a splashy White House event," according to Politico.