Tools: Us Tech Firms Pledge At White House To Bear Costs Of Energy For...

Companies will pay for upgrades and new electricity generation in agreement to mitigate concerns of rising bills

Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and several artificial intelligence companies signed a pledge at the White House on Wednesday to bear the cost of new electricity generation to power their datacenters.

The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses at a time the administration of Donald Trump is seeking to curb inflation.

“This means that the tech companies and the datacenters will be able to get the electricity they need, all without driving up electricity costs for consumers,” the president said at the pledge signing event. “This is a historic win for countless American families and we’ll also make our electricity grid stronger and more resilient than ever before.”

The so-called “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” was first announced by Trump in his State of the Union address, and comes as communities and state legislators increase scrutiny of rapidly proliferating datacenters.

Datacenters consume vast amounts of electricity to run server racks and cooling systems for the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

“Some datacenters were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it’s going to be just the opposite,” Trump said, referencing cancelled or postponed projects in recent months across several states after local opposition.

The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities.

The effort is aimed at drawing support from towns and cities that otherwise oppose the projects, said the Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“There will be no new datacenter development that’s going to happen without the local communities reading and understanding what this pledge is,” the official said.

Source: HackerNews