President Trump Orders Data Centers to Pay for Power as AI Strains the Grid

President Donald Trump is set to unveil an emergency plan Friday (Jan. 16) that would make data center owners, not households, cover the cost of new power plants as electricity demand surges.

The proposal lands as AI-driven data center construction accelerates in the PJM (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland) transmission region, a key hub for cloud infrastructure that underpins payments and commerce.

Bloomberg reported that Trump and governors in the PJM footprint will direct PJM Interconnection to run a one-time reliability auction in which data center operators bid for 15-year contracts supporting new generation.

A White House official told Bloomberg the auction could underpin about $15 billion in new plants. The initiative will be presented Friday as a nonbinding “statement of principles” signed by Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council and governors in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. PJM serves more than 67 million people.

Trump has argued that tech companies building power-hungry facilities should “pay their own way,” linking the plan to consumer bills. “I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” he said in a social media post cited by Bloomberg. Bloomberg noted the average U.S. retail electricity price hit a record 18.07 cents per kilowatt-hour in September, up 7.4%.

The administration is pushing PJM to hold the special auction by the end of September. Unlike PJM’s standard auctions that procure supplies for a 12-month period, this backstop sale would lock in long-term payments to generators — and require data center companies to pay for the contracted capacity for the full term whether they use it or not.

Bloomberg said the approach could accelerate new natural gas generation and potentially nuclear projects, while tilting the playing field toward large hyperscalers over smaller AI infrastructure providers with less ability to absorb higher power costs. PJM is not expected at Friday’s event; a spokesman told Bloomberg the grid operator was not invited.

PYMNTS has been following the same tension between AI expansion and grid constraints. PYMNTS reported that Google, Meta and others pledged billions for new AI data centers — with Google saying it planned $25 billion in spending in the PJM region. PYMNTS also examined how investors have been snapping up utility companies to ride rising electricity demand from data centers. PYMNTS covered federal efforts to speed data center connections to the grid. And it reported Meta’s deals with three nuclear energy firms to power AI-focused facilities.