Big tech is increasingly promising to pay for spiking power costs. But there’s not much to enforce it

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — As an electricity crunch drives bills higher around the country, big tech companies building power-hungry data centers are increasingly offering to pay for more of the energy they consume, so everyday people don’t get stuck with the bill.

At least, that is the message from seven large tech companies in new letters responding to three Senate Democrats’ investigation into how data center buildout nationwide is impacting electricity prices. But while these companies can make commitments, there are few regulations to ensure those promises are kept.

In mid-Atlantic states especially, a sudden boom in data center growth combined with a lack of new power to supply them has caused sharp electricity bill spikes in states including Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and the District of Columbia. Around the country, certain areas where data centers were built saw electricity costs jump as much as 267% compared to five years ago, a 2025 Bloomberg News analysis found.

Seven companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Coreweave, Equinix and Digital Realty, responded to questions from the senators on how many data centers they had, how much power those facilities needed, and how they plan to procure and pay for that power.

Some companies made commitments to foot the bill. In its letter to Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Google said it would pay for all of the electricity it would use to power its fleet of data centers and would make changes to how it manages and pays for energy use when the grid’s power usage is at its highest, a time period when data center power use can drive up prices for other customers.

Similarly, Meta said it would pay for the “full costs for energy used by our data centers” as well as funding “new and upgraded local infrastructure,” and adding new power to the grid, in a statement to CNN.

“We’ve been committed to these principles for many years and welcome recent pushes from other companies,” Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesperson, told CNN.

Microsoft made similar commitments last week.

In addition, several other tech companies wrote that they would support being put into a different class of electricity ratepayers that would be charged more for power than residents or other smaller commercial customers.

But the letters, provided first to CNN, offer few specifics on how exactly companies will implement these promises. Data companies are optimistic. Representatives from both Digital Realty and Equinix told CNN that they were looking forward to collaborations with elected officials, as well as the public and private sector, that would make positive change happen.

But details remain thin. “These commitments do not explain how Big Tech companies – not American consumers – will bear the full cost of data centers,” Warren said in a statement.

It is exceedingly difficult to know exactly how much big tech companies are actually paying electrical utilities for the power they consume. That’s because there are often secret contracts inked between utilities and data centers, rather than a public rate case, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Law School’s electricity law initiative.

“The devil is really in the details here,” and consumers don’t have much protection with the current system, Peskoe told CNN.

Warren and the other senators argued in statements that even after companies’ responses, there are a lot of unknowns, including how much they are paying towards the massive electrical infrastructure that connects data centers to the grid.

“If these companies are serious about paying their fair share, at a minimum they’d be more transparent about their data centers’ operations instead of forcing local communities to sign NDAs,” Warren said in a statement.

Google, in its letter, wrote that it was signing binding contracts that would ensure it sticks to the agreement to pay for its power, as well as paying for new infrastructure that is “directly attributable to our growth, protecting communities and ratepayers from bearing the burden.”

Likewise, Amazon wrote the company would “pay the full cost of the electricity we use and make substantial investments in new generation and transmission infrastructure that benefit all ratepayers,” but did not detail exactly how it would determine how much to pay for transmission infrastructure.

While there is a patchwork of states trying to adopt rules around data center companies paying higher electricity rates, there is currently no federal equivalent.

Van Hollen, whose home state of Maryland has seen neighboring Virginia’s massive data center buildout show up in residential electricity bills, has introduced a federal bill requiring companies to cover their energy costs.

“Big tech companies are finally beginning to acknowledge that their data centers are saddling consumers with higher electricity costs and straining our power grid – but they still refuse to take full responsibility for these problems they are creating,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “Without action from Congress, they will continue to evade accountability.”

Under the aggressively pro- AI and data center Trump administration, federal policy so far has been aimed at getting data centers built as fast as possible, even bypassing state and local laws meant to discourage data center growth.

However, there are signs that the public outcry over costs has reached the White House. Last week, President Donald Trump teased an announcement from Microsoft that it would cover the cost of its electricity and help update the grid, acknowledging the public concern over high electricity prices.

“We will have much to announce in the coming weeks to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in terms of higher Utility bills,” Trump said in a Truth Social post last week.

On Friday, a group of northeastern governors and the Trump administration announced they were asking PJM, the country’s largest electrical grid operator, to hold an emergency power auction focused on getting big tech companies locked into 15-year contracts to pay for the power costs to feed their data centers. That would essentially ensure the world’s largest companies pay for their future power needs, and the region could depend on that money to pay for power for a long period of time.

Peskoe said it’s a sign that companies and the administration are taking the issue seriously – but it’s no guarantee progress will happen.

“What I think is positive is they are acknowledging there is a problem here that needs to be solved,” he said. “I think that a lot of parties were in denial about this; particularly the data center industry was absolutely in denial about this.”

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