Your electricity bill went up 25% while Joe Biden was in the White House.
Biden spent four years strangling American energy production and pretending he had nothing to do with your rising utility bills.
Today, Trump made the most powerful companies on earth sign a pledge to make sure it never happens again.
How AI Data Centers Have Been Driving Up Your Electricity Bill
For years, Silicon Valley has been playing a game at your expense.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have been quietly plugging their massive AI data centers into the same grid that powers your home – and letting you pick up the tab for every infrastructure upgrade their demand required.
The numbers tell the story. In PJM's electricity market – covering 13 states from Illinois to Washington, D.C. – data centers were responsible for an estimated $9.3 billion in added costs pushed onto ratepayers. In Virginia, where "Data Center Alley" has exploded, Dominion Energy projected average residential electric bills could more than double – reaching $315 a month – within 15 years. And in the capacity auction covering 2026–2027, prices jumped from $28.92 to $329.17 per megawatt-day compared to two years prior.
Meanwhile, the companies consuming that power were paying industrial discount rates while your bill kept climbing.
Biden saw all of this happening. His answer was to keep killing domestic energy production – blocking pipelines, strangling natural gas, shutting down coal – while mandating unreliable wind and solar into the grid.
He didn't make Big Tech pay its fair share. He made you subsidize Big Tech's AI empire.
Trump Forces Big Tech to Pay Its Own Power Costs
This afternoon at the White House, Trump hosted the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI – and made them sign the Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
Under the pledge, these companies commit to "build, bring, or buy" their own generation resources and cover the full cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades required for their data centers. No passing expenses to American households. Period.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright was direct: the pledge will "help stop the rising electricity prices that started during the previous administration."
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman called it "a clear baseline to protect ratepayers." OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said the infrastructure enabling AI "should benefit the communities that make it possible" – not burden them.
Trump saw a problem his predecessor either missed or deliberately ignored, and he fixed it. That's the difference between a president who works for you and one who worked for them.
The Larger Picture
This is about more than one pledge signing.
America is in a global AI race with China – and winning requires massive data center buildout across Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and dozens of other states. That's a good thing. But there was a right way and a wrong way to do it.
The wrong way was the Biden approach: let Big Tech gorge on subsidized grid access, watch residential bills explode, and call it progress.
The right way is what Trump announced at the State of the Union and formalized today. The companies building AI infrastructure worth hundreds of billions of dollars can build their own power plants. They can produce their own electricity. They can stop treating your utility bill as a corporate subsidy program.
The pledge also commits these companies to hire and train workers from within the communities where data centers operate – meaning the AI boom creates local jobs instead of just local power surges.
Democrats spent years running on affordability. Two Democrat governors – in New Jersey and Virginia – just won landslide elections on the issue last November. And today, a Republican president walked the most powerful tech executives in the world into the White House and made them pay their own way. Chuck Schumer has been very quiet about it.
Sources:
- Brooke Singman and Emma Colton, "Trump brings Big Tech executives to White House to curb power costs for American households amid AI boom," Fox News, March 4, 2026.
- "Major tech companies back Trump pledge to pay more for data center electricity ahead of signing," Fox Business, March 4, 2026.
- "Trump to welcome Big Tech leaders to WH for Ratepayer Protection Pledge," Fox News, March 4, 2026.
- "Energy Costs Are Rising And Bidenomics Is To Blame," Institute for Energy Research, October 2025.
- "Increasing Power Prices Are Being Wrongly Blamed on the Trump Administration," Institute for Energy Research, October 2025.
- Phil Flynn, "Americans hit with soaring electricity bills as price hikes outpace inflation nationwide," Fox Business, February 2026.
