The White House wants AI companies to cover rising interest rates. Most of them have already said they will.

The proliferation of AI data centers connected to the national electric grid has helped increase electricity prices for consumers, causing the national average electricity price to rise more than 6% last year.

That’s not a good look for incumbents heading into next fall’s election, and President Donald Trump addressed the challenge in his State of the Union address last night.

“We are telling big tech companies that they have to commit to providing their own energy needs,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factories, so no one’s prices go up.”

The supermeter in question does not need to be told. They have already made public commitments in recent weeks to cover electricity costs by building their own power supplies, paying higher rates, or both, as part of a broader effort to solve public relations problems around data center expansion and win over skeptical communities.

On January 11, Microsoft announced its policy to “ensure that the cost of electricity to service our data centers is not passed on to residential customers.” On January 26, OpenAI committed to “paying for our energy costs ourselves, so that our operations do not increase your energy prices.” On February 11, Anthropic made the same pledge to “cover electricity price increases experienced by consumers from our data centers.” Yesterday, Google announced the world’s largest battery project to support a data center in Minnesota.

What these commitments mean in practice, and who will determine which data centers are responsible for any price increases, remains unknown. The White House did not respond to questions about the policy from TechCrunch.

“A handshake agreement with Big Tech on data center costs is not good enough,” Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly said on social media. “Americans need assurance that energy prices will not rise, and that local communities can have a say.”

White House spokesman Taylor Rodger said the companies will send representatives next week to formally sign the pledge at the White House. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI are said to be among the participants scheduled to attend. But none of the companies have confirmed their attendance.

Even if technology companies commit to shouldering the electricity costs, on-site power plants may not be a silver bullet. They could still have negative impacts on the surrounding environment, and would put pressure on supply chains for natural gas, turbines, photovoltaics and batteries, depending on how companies aim to power their computers.