By Tim McLaughlin, Laila Kearney and Jarrett Renshaw
July 22 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is set to unveil on Thursday a pledge backed by governors, lawmakers, utilities and data center developers aimed at shielding households from electricity costs tied to the AI boom, as he pushes to make the United States the global leader in artificial intelligence.
It extends Trump's original Ratepayer Protection Pledge from March to ensure the companies building and using data centers pay above and beyond
normal rates so that costs are not passed on to average households.
Trump will be joined by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and several of the state governors who signed the original pledge, according to a White House official.
Protecting electricity customers from data center demands is no easy task, however, as the country's patchwork system of regional electric grids is already under severe strain. Massive congestion on transmission lines, for example, surged 81% to $3.2 billion in 2025 in the PJM Interconnection, the largest regional electric grid that serves 67 million people.
Last week, the latest annual power auction at PJM pushed up prices to record levels. On Thursday, energy regulator FERC will meet to discuss the precarious future of PJM in light of its ongoing supply and demand imbalance.
"Today’s electricity system forces almost everyone, from homeowners to hyperscale data centers, to depend on the same network," Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, recently wrote.
"That one-size-fits-all model increasingly does not serve either group well. Large customers may wait a decade or longer for service, while ordinary ratepayers worry that expanding the grid for massive new industrial loads will ultimately increase their own bills."
Data center advocates say the industry’s rapid expansion is driving long-overdue investments in America’s electric grid and cite other factors driving up costs, including power-plant retirements and transmission constraints.
The White House says the pledge, which is nonbinding, will now cover 80% of all the power delivered to U.S. homes and businesses.
(Reporting By Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Laila Kearney in New York and Jarrett Renshaw; editing by Timothy Gardner and Nia Williams)
