Trump says voters won’t fund AI’s power binge, Microsoft says it will pay, and 2026 rate cases will decide who eats the cost as electric bills rise
President Donald Trump has found his latest cost-of-living villain: the data center, a windowless industrial box that can guzzle power like a steel mill and still be described, somehow, as a “cloud.” In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump claimed Microsoft would make “major changes” so Americans “don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption” as part of the company’s AI buildout, framing utility bills as the one line he won’t let Silicon Valley cross.
“I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” the president wrote, claiming that his administration is working with major Big Tech to secure its “commitment to the American People.” He added, “We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI,” the president wrote. “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’” Microsoft, Trump said, is the first company up.
On Tuesday, the company announced a plan to build a “Community-First AI Infrastructure” initiative built around five commitments, led by a blunt one: “We’ll pay our way to ensure our datacenters don’t increase your electricity prices.” The company says it will push utilities and state commissions to set its rates “high enough to cover the electricity costs” of serving its facilities including the infrastructure needed so those costs are “not passed on to residential customers,” and it says it will pay for transmission and substation upgrades when its growth requires them. The plan also leans hard into the other local pressure point water pledging to minimize use, replenish more than it consumes, and publish regional water data, while arguing that asking the public to subsidize profitable tech companies’ AI power needs is “unfair and politically unrealistic.”
In short, the company said that means a “commitment to do this work differently than some others and to do it responsibly.” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, hosted a discussion Tuesday morning on “who pays for the AI boom.”
Trump’s post is political posturing with a real technical target: the increasing fear and reality that ratepayers are subsidizing grid buildouts for hyperscale loads. The tab is already moving. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ electricity index was up 6.7% over the 12 months ending December 2025, a clean national read on what households feel when they open their bills. And the Energy Information Administration’s pricing data tells the same story: Average residential electricity prices rose from 16.60 cents per kilowatt-hour in August 2024 to 17.62 cents in August 2025 a 6.1% jump.
The timing of Trump’s comments is convenient and the math is inconvenient. On the same day, a Rhodium Group estimate said U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.4% in 2025, reversing two years of declines, with the power sector up 3.8% in part because coal generation increased to meet demand from data centers and bitcoin mining. The data center boom is no longer a hypothetical strain on the grid. It’s starting to show up in the country’s emissions ledger, and in the politics of electricity bills.
With the November midterms looming, the politics of “who pays” is getting louder partially because electricity is one of the few inflation storylines that lands in every district, every month, in the least ignorable format possible. Trump’s message is built for that moment: Don’t blame tariffs, don’t blame utilities, don’t blame him. Blame the power-hungry AI buildout.
But utility decisions don’t move on the same calendar as political campaigns; grid upgrades, rate cases, and capacity costs show up on bills long after the ribbon-cuttings, which means every new data center becomes a rolling referendum on affordability. Trump is trying to promise voters they won’t subsidize AI’s power binge at the same moment new data indicates the binge is already nudging emissions in the wrong direction. If the grid can’t add clean supply fast enough, the short-term “solution” could look a lot like the old one: keep existing fossil plants running longer, burn what’s available, and sort out the politics later.
