US President Donald Trump has promised to make big tech companies “pick up the bill” for electricity usage to prevent ordinary Americans from paying higher electricity bills.
“We never want Americans to have to pay higher energy bills because of data centers,” President Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday.
He blamed Democrats for soaring home electricity bills and vowed to work with America’s big tech companies to “secure our commitment to the American people,” with an announcement expected in the coming weeks.
The average price of electricity per kilowatt-hour in the average U.S. city has increased about 40% over the past five years, according to the St. Louis Fed.
The president said that Microsoft, which his team has been working with, plans to make major changes starting this week to “ensure Americans don’t ‘nip-pick’ their electricity consumption by paying higher utility bills.”
“We are the ‘hottest’ country in the world and number one in AI. Data centers are key to that boom and will keep Americans free and safe, but the big tech companies that build them will have to ‘pay their own way.'”
Data center power demand skyrockets
According to Visual Capitalist, US data center demand in 2025 accounted for 5.2% of total US electricity usage, or 224 terawatt hours (TWh), an increase of 21% from the previous year.
McKinsey & Company predicts that by 2030, electricity consumption from data centers in the United States could exceed 600 TWh, or 11.7% of all electricity in the United States.
According to network installers, cooling accounts for 30% to 40% of a facility’s total energy usage, and servers and IT equipment consume approximately 40% to 60% of a facility’s total electricity.
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency estimates that power demand for AI-focused data centers is increasing by about 30% annually, compared to 9% for traditional server workloads.
U.S. data center power consumption is expected to triple by 2030. Source: Visual Capitalist
Bitcoin mining power usage
Bitcoin mining is also a power-intensive operation that relies on huge data centers to find the next block and crunch the numbers.
But last week, ESG expert Daniel Batten compared the national rise in U.S. utility bills from 2021 to 2024 with an area in Texas that had an unusually high concentration of Bitcoin mining and found that they were very similar.
“There is no evidence in the data or in peer-reviewed studies to support the claim that Bitcoin mining increases consumers’ electricity bills,” he concluded.
Bitcoin mining has several other documented environmental benefits, including removing bottlenecks to on-grid renewable energy, funding green energy research and development, and eliminating harmful methane emissions.
