President Donald Trump pledged to make tech companies absorb rate hikes driven by new data centers needed in part to power artificial intelligence, but community concerns and growing grass-roots blowback against data centers from both red and blue states focuses on more than just electricity costs, as documented by local coverage of these clashes.  

The pledge, which is sparse on details, and directs the companies to “provide for their own power needs,” may not even have its intended impact of saving consumers money. Rate hikes are driven by much more than just power generation, and Trump’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel policies have created the risk of higher natural gas prices. 

Local reporting shows that communities around the country have significant fears and uncertainty about the burden of data centers. 

• During his State of the Union address, Trump told viewers that he “negotiated the new rate payer protection pledge” by “telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs.” He continued that “they can build their own plant. They're going to produce their own electricity. It will ensure the company's ability to get electricity, while at the same time, lowering prices of electricity for you.” [Reuters, 2/24/26]
   
• CNBC reported that “President Donald Trump will meet with executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and Open AI at the White House,” where they will sign the pledge. Politico also wrote that after the speech, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said “that in addition to paying for their power generation, the tech companies would also ‘advance some money to add additions to the grid.’ He didn’t say how much money that would entail or who they would pay it to.” [CNBC, 2/25/26; Politico, 2/26/26]
   
• A Bloomberg News analysis in fall 2025 found that wholesale “electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity.” [Bloomberg, 9/29/25]
   
• The pushback against data centers is bipartisan and significant. According to Data Center Watch’s 2025 review of public statements from “elected officials in districts with large data center projects (50 MW>) under consideration,” “55% of the politicians who had taken public positions against the data center projects were Republicans, and 45% were Democrats.” Additionally, the group found that $64 billion worth of data center projects were either blocked or delayed between 2023 and early 2025. Major developments “tend to be located in red states," however “there have been projects blocked in red states and blue states.” [Data Center Watch, 2025; Inside Climate News, 5/19/25]
   

• Tech companies building their own energy supply wouldn’t fix the long wait for new power plants to come online, shifting the supply and demand problem and likely raising natural gas prices instead of electricity bills. Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told Politico that power plants cannot be built fast enough to meet data center demand, which drives up the cost for gas turbines, which are the most common electricity generation means for data centers, in part because of the Trump administration’s commitment to advancing fossil fuels. The Department of Energy just approved the largest loan in its history, which will be used to “provide 5.3 GW of new gas generation and nearly 500 megawatts (MW) in gas capacity upgrades, including three new natural gas turbines” in Georgia and Alabama. [Politico, 2/25/26; Department of Energy, 2/25/26; Wired, 7/16/25]
   
• Trump’s actions to expand natural gas could exacerbate high prices as domestic demand rises. One of Trump’s first moves in this term was to reverse a Biden-era directive to pause part of a massive liquified natural gas buildout and order it to resume “as expeditiously as possible.” According to Reuters, “The U.S. in 2025 became the first country to export more than 100 million metric tons (mmt) of liquefied natural gas in a single year.” The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis warned that LNG exports would likely raise the cost of electricity and home heating in part because the increase exposes “domestic consumers to global price volatility.” [The White House, 1/20/25; Reuters, 1/2/26; Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis 8/4/25; Media Matters, 2/2/24]
   
• Trump spoke only of addressing the cost of energy supply while “most of today’s cost pressure is coming from transmission, distribution, and system readiness, not energy supply,” Brandon Owens, a grid expert and founder of advisory platform AIxEnergy, told Politico. In a piece titled “Here’s a reality check on Trump’s AI pledge: Trump’s promise to protect power customers’ wallets from data centers covers only part of the costs of expanding AI,” Politico wrote: “Utilities such as Ohio-based American Electric Power are spending billions of dollars to string high-voltage power lines. PJM, the grid operator in 13 Mid-Atlantic and eastern Great Lakes states, has approved $11.8 billion in new transmission projects. Data centers are the largest recipients. The costs, spread across the 67 million people in the PJM region, are roughly double the past two transmission budgets.” [Politico, 2/25/26; Canary Media, 8/22/25]

• In New Brunswick, New Jersey, a major development project will feature a public park, housing, and small business warehouses after the city council voted down plans for a data center. According to New Jersey Digest, local activists had raised concerns that the data center would “strain resources and contribute to rising utility costs.” An activist with Climate Revolution Action Network had told News 12 New Jersey that “the water usage of this facility will be off the charts” and “for the longest time, this was supposed to be housing and parks.” [New Jersey Digest, 2/20/26; News 12 New Jersey, 2/18/26; Business Insider, 2/18/26]
   
• WCMH NBC 4 covered pushback against the construction of a natural gas fuel cell system that would be built near an elementary school in Hilliard, Ohio, sparking concerns about fire safety and emissions. The project is intended to power Amazon Web Services data centers. WCMG reported that a report from Community & Environmental Defense Services “found a single data center could pose negative health risks for people living at least 0.6-miles away, sometimes further.” [WCMH NBC 44, 12/3/25, 2/25/25]
   
• Following an effort by the NAACP and environmental justice groups “to create guidelines for tech companies building data centers in black and brown communities,” including in Memphis, Tennessee, a study found that xAI’s proposed methane gas turbines in the city would increase air pollution and cause health harms to residents of North Mississippi and West Tennessee. The report found that the new turbines, intended to power the Colossus 2 data center in South Memphis, could cause some communities to “see increases of fine particle pollution of .5 micrograms per cubic meter, a level linked to an increase in per-person mortality risk comparable in scale to the average annual risk of death from alcohol-impaired driving in the United States,” according to the Southern Environmental Law Center. Recent reporting from Floodlight News also revealed that some gas turbines powering Colossus are “unpermitted” and “spewing pollutants.” The investigation noted that “the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.” [WMC Action News 5, 8/24/25; Southern Environmental Law Center, 2/16/26; Floodlight News, 2/13/26]
   
• The nonprofit newsroom 100 Days in Appalachia wrote that residents in Tucker County, West Virginia, “mounted a campaign of dissent” against the construction of a 10,000-square-foot AI data center and natural gas fired plant based on concerns about the health impacts. The proposed site is just a mile away from an elementary school. “Among the air quality issues of concern raised at the hearing with state officials were nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde and particulate matter that infiltrates the lungs and can pass into the bloodstream, causing heart disease,” wrote the site. “‘These pollutants are known to make asthma, COPD and other respiratory and cardiovascular problems worse, and we have an aging population,’ says Amy Margolies, a public health researcher and full-time Tucker County resident. ‘Both the COPD rates and the asthma rates are above the West Virginia average, which is above the national average.’” [100 Days In Appalachia, 7/26/25]
   
• Voters in Augusta Township, Michigan, will vote on a proposal that would rezone more than 500 acres of land south of Ann Arbor to make way for a data center that some worry will generate noise and light pollution, in addition to fundamentally changing the character of the township. Inside Climate News wrote that resident Travis Matts is particularly concerned about “the loss of the rural character,” which he said state leaders and Augusta Township Board of Trustees didn’t consider. [Michigan Live, 2/25/26; Inside Climate News, 10/9/25]
   
• The Tucson, Arizona, city council voted to prohibit Amazon from using the city’s water to power a new data center over concerns about existing water shortages, but the project may still move forward with a different corporate owner and a different cooling method. The Tucson Spotlight reported that “the data center’s daily water use, estimated between one and five million gallons, raises concerns, as it would become Tucson Electric Power’s largest single customer.” One resident called the project “deeply shortsighted” and added, “As we’re all aware, Arizona and the entire Southwest are facing critical water shortages, particularly the Central Arizona Project is no longer secure as we once thought it was.” The water was primarily to be used for cooling the servers, and Beale Infrastructure, the company building the data center, “has since moved toward air-cooling technology for the facility.” No corporate end user has reportedly replaced Amazon. [KJZZ Phoenix, 12/9/25; Tucson Spotlight, 6/26/25; KGUN 9 ABC, 12/3/25]