The AI boom is running into its first true physical constraint: electricity.
And now Trump is essentially saying: if Big Tech wants to build the next wave of data centers, they’re going to have to help pay for the grid expansion too.
What Trump is expected to announce
Trump is expected to roll out a plan requiring Big Tech companies to bid into 15-year contracts for new electricity generation capacity.
Translation: tech companies will be pressured to help finance new power plants, especially in PJM, the most important grid region for “Data Center Alley” expansion.
It’s the policy version of “pay your own way.”
Why this matters
AI demand isn’t just raising power usage, it’s raising power prices. And that quickly becomes political because households and small businesses don’t want to subsidize trillion-dollar GPU farms.
So the White House is shifting the cost burden directly onto hyperscalers.
Microsoft already moved first
Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 1.17% ) responded almost immediately to Trump’s earlier comments, saying it would pay utility rates high enough to fully cover its electricity costs, and it supports tiered pricing where very large users pay more.
That sets the template for what other hyperscalers may now be pushed into doing.
Which tech companies get hurt most
Not all Big Tech is impacted the same way:
Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 1.17% ) , Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.25% ) , Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 0.29% ) can pass a chunk of these costs downstream because they sell cloud capacity.
Meta $META ( ▲ 0.97% ) doesn’t have a cloud business, so higher power costs hit margins directly, and the ROI has to show up indirectly through ads.
That makes Meta the most exposed if “AI equals higher electricity bills” becomes a lasting political narrative.
Bottom line
This is a major turning point.
The US is basically saying: AI is welcome, but the grid bill is not getting passed to voters. If Big Tech wants more compute, they’re going to have to fund more power too.