Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe have signed the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, widening President Donald Trump’s effort to manage how data centers affect energy prices while the bill still lands on ordinary people.
The pledge is nonbinding. That matters. It was first signed at a White House event in March by the heads of seven tech companies, who promised to cover the full costs tied to powering their data centers, including energy and water use, electric grid improvements and maintenance. Now electric utilities are also expected to sign it, according to seven people familiar with the plans, with Southern Co., Duke Energy and Exelon named as examples.
The White House wouldn’t confirm the signatories, but said the pledge was drawing new support. “There is nothing to announce at this time, but President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge has been so impactful that additional stakeholders also want to sign it,” a White House official said in a statement.
Who Pays When Power Gets Scarcer
Average electricity prices have risen 4 percent in the last 12 months, outpacing overall U.S. inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Power bills cooled last month, but federal forecasts say the cost is expected to rise even further in the coming years. That’s the pressure point behind all the ceremonial signatures and staged unity: the people paying monthly bills are the ones absorbing the strain while the biggest users of electricity negotiate their way through the apparatus.
The Trump administration is using the pledge as its latest attempt to quell public concerns over artificial intelligence and rising energy prices. The political theater is obvious enough. The costs are not.
The participation of GOP governors alongside Trump, which had not been previously reported, underscores the political liability data centers have posed to elected officials across the country. Staffers for several Democratic governors said the White House did not reach out to Democrats to sign the pledge, and a White House spokesperson declined to comment when asked about contact with Democratic governors.
What They Call “Protection”
A spokesperson for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the White House was politicizing a matter that has galvanized elected officials from both parties. Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday to pause most new hyperscale data center construction in the state. “It’s unfortunately no surprise that this Administration would play partisan politics on such a critical issue,” spokesperson Ken Lovett said in a statement. “While Washington Republicans play politics and make pledges they won’t keep, Governor Hochul is taking real action to keep the lights on and costs down for New Yorkers.”
That’s the language of managed crisis: pledges, executive orders, and carefully packaged promises, all while the same centralized systems decide who gets power and who gets squeezed.
A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said there had been no outreach from the White House, even though Polis agrees with its merits. “With or without this pledge, the Governor’s north star has always been that any data center development must lower energy costs for Coloradans and save people money on energy,” said spokesperson Eric Maruyama.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein also had not received any word from the Trump administration, spokesperson Kate Schmidt said in an email. She said the White House pledge aligns with Stein’s Energy Policy Task Force and that the Democratic governor believes data centers “need to pay their way so that North Carolina residents don’t bear the costs of their massive energy consumption.”
The Limits of Their Fixes
Member states of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of mostly-Democratic governors, have enacted policies and made commitments that exceed Trump’s pledge, said Nikki Burnett, a spokesperson with the group. She cited Hochul’s action along with initiatives in Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
In January, Trump and a bipartisan group of governors directly called on the PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the United States, to hold an emergency auction for tech companies to buy power in a bid to tame skyrocketing prices in the region. The same system that creates the squeeze keeps asking the public to trust more coordination from above.
In March, executives from Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft signed their own pledge to pay the full cost of electric infrastructure for their data centers. That pledge also committed companies to work with grid operators to contribute to reliability and to offer backup power to prevent blackouts.
Even so, enforcement of the framework largely falls to state legislatures and utility commissions. Tech companies under the pledge were also tasked with negotiating rate structures with utilities and state governments. The burden of making corporate promises mean anything gets pushed down into the same institutions that already manage the grid on behalf of capital.
Lawmakers in the House are seeking to codify the president’s pledge into law. Some Democratic lawmakers have gone further, calling for a nationwide data center moratorium. The fight keeps moving through official channels, where reform gets packaged as relief and the public gets told to wait for the next hearing, the next commission, the next pledge.