Both the White House and tech industry appear keen to limit the fallout from data centers, with initiatives to bring down electricity prices and recast the sprawling facilities as community players willing to pay their fair share.
While the Trump administration has been broadly supportive of data centers, including through efforts to fast-track their construction, going forward that support may have limitations.
"We are going to embrace data centers, but not at the price ... of raising costs for consumers," a senior White House official told The Hill on Tuesday.
"So if you want to invest and build data centers, you've got to do it in the right way, the way that is not going to pass that cost onto consumers," the official said.
The White House official said the administration was working with "each of the major hyperscalers and data center operators" to try to find ways to defray costs for consumers. The person declined to name specific companies.
The comments come as data centers face increasing backlash, including because of their potential impacts on high electricity prices, becoming a potential liability for the GOP.
In a rare show of bipartisanship, the Trump administration announced earlier this month that it was joining forces with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) and then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to pressure the nation's largest regional grid operator to address rising electricity prices.
They urged grid operator PJM, which serves large swaths of the East Coast and Midwest, to make data centers pay more for new power sources added to the grid than households, unless the data centers provide their own power sources.
PJM has proposed a more incentive-based approach, offering expedited grid connections for data centers that bring their own power sources.
While the Trump administration has sought to rapidly expand the growth of data centers, in recent weeks, it has shifted its message to emphasize concerns about the impacts these technologies are having on consumers' pocketbooks.
"We are the 'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and Number One in AI. 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,'" Trump argued in a post on Truth Social a few days before the PJM announcement.
Several tech companies have echoed the president's language in unveiling their own efforts. Microsoft announced a five-pronged "community first" AI infrastructure, vowing to "pay our own way" to prevent its data centers from raising consumer electricity bills.
OpenAI made similar commitments for its Stargate project, describing it as a "partnership with communities" and suggesting that "we can only achieve our mission by being good neighbors."
"This is directly a response to growing backlash," said Miquel Vila, lead analyst at Data Center Watch, a project from the AI company 10a Labs tracking local opposition to data centers.
Check out the full report at TheHill.com tomorrow.
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