Trump’s Big Tech Pledge Won’t Do: Advocates Make Case for Nationwide Moratorium on Data Centers

Several Big Tech CEOs met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday and pledged to fund their own energy infrastructure needed to power their artificial intelligence data centers that have caused US utility bills to spike over the last year.

That same day, Food and Water Watch slammed the pledge as "wholly inadequate" and released what it described as a "first-of-its-kind report" outlining the massive environmental and human costs imposed by the AI data center explosion.

Among other things, the report states that data centers' vast energy needs are throwing a "lifeline to the fossil fuel industry," while undermining the many gains made from the revolution in clean power technology.

"AI expansion is largely fueled by dirty energy sources," the report notes. "In the US, over 40% of energy for data centers comes from natural gas, 24% from solar and wind combined, 20% from nuclear, and 15% from coal."

The report also pours cold water on Trump's plan to have Big Tech build its own energy infrastructure to power its data centers.

"Power plants can’t come online fast enough to fuel this growth," the report explains. "Data centers in New York state are seeking more than 9,000 megawatts (MW) of new demand—about 1.5 times the power consumption of every household in the state in 2024. Georgia Power predicts that energy sales will almost double by the early 2030s, largely driven by data centers. This steep demand increase can raise residential electricity costs—regardless of whether the new data centers pull from the grid or not."

Electricity isn't the only resource consumed in vast quantities by AI data centers, and the report also shines a light on the enormous amounts of water required to keep the facilities from overheating.

"The amount of water consumed by data centers more than tripled from 2014 to 2023," the report explains. "By 2028, US data centers could use as many as 720 billion gallons of water each year just to cool AI servers. This is equal to over 1 million Olympic-size swimming pools—or enough water to meet the indoor needs of 18.5 million American households."

Food and Water Watch says that the report's findings point to only one solution: A moratorium on AI data center construction along the lines of what US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed last year.

"The well-documented harms of AI data centers cannot be resolved with piecemeal regulations or vague promises from AI enthusiasts of a utopian future," the report concludes. "Nothing short of a halt to the data center rollout will suffice until a comprehensive regulatory framework is developed to ensure that people and the environment are fully protected."

Meghan Pazik, senior policy advocate with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, also criticized Trump's AI data center pledge on Thursday and argued that the president's plan "isn’t doing anything binding to cut energy bills."

"Data centers increase residential energy bills by upwards of 250% and many communities are left in the dark on these projects from the start," said Pazik. "Asking corporations to sign meaningless ‘agreements’ fits Trump’s tired pattern of seeking fake concessions from corporations that translate to zero action or relief."

Trump's AI data center pledge comes at a time when US voters are facing increasing economic pressure across multiple fronts. In addition to data centers' impacts on utility bills, Americans are also facing increased costs from Trump's global tariffs on imported products and a spike in gas prices caused by the president's war against Iran.

While Trump has claimed to be prioritizing cutting costs with the data center pledge, he was dismissive of Americans’ concerns about paying more for gas this week, telling Reuters in an interview that “if [gas prices] rise, they rise.”