Trump Moves to Make Tech Giants Pay for Surging Power Costs

President Donald Trump and the governors of several US Northeastern states agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that would compel technology companies to effectively fund new power plants.

The unprecedented plan, set to be announced Friday morning, seeks to address growing tensions over how the nation can supply electricity to power-hungry data centers — seen as necessary to help win the global AI race — without simultaneously hiking utility bills for homes and businesses.

The Trump administration and some US governors plan to direct grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC to hold an auction for tech companies to bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation capacity.

If the auction proceeds as envisaged, tech giants would pay for power over the duration of the contracts, whether they use the electricity or not, providing secure revenues for years in a market notorious for price volatility and generator bankruptcies.

The auction would deliver contracts supporting the construction of some $15 billion worth of new power plants, said a White House official granted anonymity to detail the approach.

Still, representatives of PJM won’t be in attendance when the plan is laid out Friday.

“We don’t have a lot to say on this,” PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields said by email. “We were not invited to the event they are apparently having tomorrow and we will not be there.”

In some ways, Trump is handing tech companies what they’ve been desperately seeking for the past three years: a massive supply of new electricity they can depend on when they energize the hundreds of billions of dollars in mega-data centers now under construction. Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI have already collectively invested in the development of several gigawatts of new power — with a single gigawatt bei Bloomberg's Mandeep Singh joins to discuss on Bloomberg Intelligence.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

One of the biggest beneficiaries in reaction to the move was the maker of natural gas turbines GE Vernova Inc., which climbed as much as 7.6% on Friday after Jefferies said it sees it as a winner from the auction. Shares of the largest independent power producers slid. Vistra Corp. declined as much at 9.5%, Talen Energy Corp. slipped as much as 10.7% and Constellation Energy Corp. dropped as much as 8%.

Read More: GE Vernova Up, Talen Falls on Power Auction For Tech Companies

The push by the administration and the governors — which will come in the form of a non-binding “statement of principles” signed by Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and other states — responds to growing concern about power demand far outpacing supply in the region managed by PJM.

The grid operator serves more than 67 million people from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. PJM is already home to the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, in northern Virginia. It expects peak demand across its system to jump 17% by 2030 from this year’s high.

Trump has repeatedly described power plants being built alongside data centers, and on Monday, he doubled down on the idea, insisting in a social media post that the big technology companies that construct data centers must “pay their own way.”

“I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump wrote in his post.

Cost-of-living concerns are already weighing heavily on Republicans’ bid to maintain control of the House and Senate in this November’s congressional elections. While Trump has stressed the plummeting cost of oil and gasoline since he took office last January, electricity prices have climbed due to rising demand — and there’s a building backlash against data centers that are fueling the surge.

The average US retail price for electricity gained 7.4% in September to a record 18.07 cents per kilowatt-hour, the biggest gain since December 2023. Residential prices have jumped even higher, rising by 10.5% between January and August 2025, marking one of the largest increases in more than a decade, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

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