SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
data centers
Trump’s Big Tech Pledge Won’t Do: Advocates Make Case for Nationwide Moratorium on Data Centers
"Nothing short of a halt to the data center rollout will suffice... to ensure that people and the environment are fully protected."
Mar 06, 2026
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.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's AI Data Center 'Ratepayer Protection Pledge' Derided as Unenforceable, 'Theatrical Stunt'
"These pledges are nothing more than desperate damage control for companies who only now realize that voters see them as the villains of this story," said one progressive advocate.
Feb 25, 2026
Climate action advocates and energy experts alike said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's "ratepayer protection pledge," introduced during his State of the Union address Tuesday night, will do little to alleviate rising household electricity costs brought on by the White House's mandated artificial intelligence expansion and the construction of thousands of hulking data centers across the country.
During his address, the president acknowledged that many Americans are "concerned that energy demands from AI data centers could unfairly drive up their electric utility bills," as they already are.
A CNBC analysis published last November found that in addition to average electricity prices rising by more than 6% across the country, according to the Energy Information Administration, households in states with high concentrations of data centers—including Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio—have seen their rates climb by as much as 16% in the past year.
The National Energy Assistance Directors Association also said last year that about 21 million American families were behind on their utility bills, with the average overdue amount about a third higher than it was in 2023.
Trump said Tuesday that he had negotiated a deal with major tech companies, ensuring they "have the obligation to provide for their own power needs and can build their own power plant as part of their factory, so that no one's prices will go up."
Energy industry experts told Politico on Wednesday that if enforced, the pledge—which Trump and the White House offered few details about—would still only partially address rising household costs associated with the AI expansion, which are being caused by the AI industry's rapidly growing demand for power lines, fuel, natural wind turbines, and other energy needs to run massive data centers.
The data centers require energy equivalent to that of 186 large nuclear power plants, according to the data firm Cleanview, and some of them have electricity needs that could power millions of homes.
But Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Politico that in seeking lower costs for consumers, the White House is "putting this pledge on the wrong entities," as the details of how energy costs are distributed among millions of ratepayers are determined by utilities and state regulators—not tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic, which lauded the president's announcement and announced their own pledges to ostensibly protect households from rising costs.
“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 ahead of the speech. “Those costs remain even if a data center self-supplies generation.”
With Trump fast-tracking AI data center expansion, utilities are spending far more than they have previously to set up electricity infrastructure. As Politico reported, PJM, which operates the grid for 13 states in the eastern US, has approved $11.8 billion for new transmission projects, with data centers being the largest recipients of new electricity. About 67 million people in the region covered by PJM will split the cost of the new projects, paying roughly double what they did for the company's last two transmission budgets.
Emily Peterson-Casson, policy director for the progressive advocacy group Demand Progress, said in a statement ahead of the State of the Union address that Trump's ratepayer protection pledge amounts "to worthless pinky swears from the multi-billion dollar corporations who are trying to force us to sacrifice our jobs, our children, our privacy, and our communities for an uncertain, AI-powered future that they can control and we won’t."
Rising electricity costs, she said, are just one of many concerns Americans have expressed about AI in numerous recent polls. One taken by YouGov last week found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the expansion of AI will reduce the number of jobs available to workers, and another by Bentley University and Gallup found 79% of respondents didn't trust companies to use AI responsibly.
"In addition to providing a dubious balm to skyrocketing electricity bills, these pledges do nothing to address out-of-control AI that caused outages at Amazon Web Services, creates sexualized images of minors, and has led teens in need of help to take their own lives," said Peterson-Casson. "These pledges are nothing more than desperate damage control for companies who only now realize that voters see them as the villains of this story.”
The climate action group 350.org also derided the ratepayer protection pledge as a "theatrical stunt with no enforceable mechanism," and said it would only worsen the ramp up of costly fossil fuel production that Trump has overseen by delaying the closure of expensive, polluting coal plants; blocking solar and wind projects; and approving more liquefied natural gas exports.
Trump said the his address that the US is experiencing a "Golden Age," noted 350.org executive director Anne Jellema, but that's true "only for fossil fuel companies that poured $96 million into the Trump administration."
"For the millions of Americans who cannot afford to pay their energy bills, it is like heading back to the dark ages. The Trump administration cannot claim to stand for American consumers while blocking progress in renewables, the cheapest form of energy available today. It cannot champion affordability while doubling down on a highly volatile gas market and driving conflicts that inevitably increase energy prices everywhere,” said Jellema. “Trump’s bravado cannot disguise the fundamental insecurity at the heart of his administration: Fossil fuels are increasingly unviable, and even businesses want to move on. Around the world, people are demanding and building a clean, affordable energy future, with or without the US government."
350.org also pointed to a recent poll by E3G, Beyond Fossil Fuels, and We Mean Business that showed 97% of nearly 1,500 business executives supported a transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, citing "competitive edge and long-term energy security."
Journalist Ray Locker added on social media, "The best way to protect ratepayers is to not shackle them to using fossil fuels to generate electricity."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Pausing the Data Center Buildout Is the (Humanly) Intelligent Choice
We should stop and think before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere.
Feb 24, 2026
For a variety of reasons, I’ve found the data center debate to be difficult to get a real handle on over the last year. But I think a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and I will do my best here to share it with you. Remember, I’m just one human brain, and I have not (illegally) digested every single book ever printed; I can’t draw you a picture of a data center licking an ice cream cone; and if you asked me to render this essay in the style of Emily Dickinson I would fail. Still, for what it’s worth:
First source of confusion: How much demand for AI will there actually be?
This depends on how useful it turns out to be, and that is still a very open question. Yes, AI executives are busy insisting it will upend everything and everyone—the AI chief at Microsoft said last week that all white-collar jobs using computers will be wiped out in the next 12 to 18 months—accountants, project managers, marketing staff. But there’s another school of thought—most ably represented by an AI researcher named Gary Marcus—that thinks the hallucination-prone large language models are good at writing certain kinds of code but not getting much better, and in fact may be at about the limit of their abilities.
There’s a second question resting on top of that one: Whatever AI can do, will it make a lot of money doing it, thus justifying the enormous investments currently being made or planned for data centers? The stock market apparently thinks so—AI makes up some stupendous percentage of its gains in recent years—but there are, as you have heard, fears it might be a bubble. The most eloquent—indeed logorrheic—source of those fears is Ed Zitron, a blogger who has followed the various money trails and concluded that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no real prospect of making back the scads of money that they’ve spent, and that sooner or later the bubble will indeed do the thing bubbles do.
If we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy.
These are crucial questions for us because as long as the bubble keeps expanding, there will be insatiable demand for more electricity for more data centers, and if it pops that demand will start to drop dramatically, especially since much of it is still semi-speculative—that is to say, there are far more data centers on the drawing board (to use an old-fashioned image) than under construction.
In fact, it’s been remarkably hard to estimate how much demand for electricity is actually going to go up, precisely because there’s so much speculation here. In an interview that got pretty wonky even for him, the invaluable David Roberts last week talked to Clara Summer, a public advocate at the PJM Interconnection Board, PJM being the the largest regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States, managing the high-voltage electric grid for 67 million people across 13 states from Delaware to Illinois. Anyway, Summer explained that any given data center might be applying for permits to build in four or five different jurisdictions:
There is a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and said, “I am interested in being in this area,” versus a data center that has entered into a contract with a utility and put down money.
One estimate has that the number of requests for potential data centers to connect to the grid is 5 to 10 times more than the number of actual data centers that will be built.
Obviously, however, there are plenty of data centers going up. Some are truly terrible (consider the joint investigation by Floodlight News and the Guardian of an xAI facility in Mississippi; it has followed the path of Elon Musk’s egregious data center in the poor part of Memphis, both using portable gas turbines that pollute the air, and all in an effort to support an artificial “intelligence” that goes on long happy rants about Hitler; it won’s surprise you that the NAACP was early in expressing concern) and some are less terrible: Google just signed up for two big solar farms in Texas to support its data centers.
The default, sadly, seems to be headed toward the Musk model. With grid providers unable to build generating capacity fast enough to keep up with demand, data center developers are going BYOG—bring your own generation. Here’s a long and detailed new report about how the G generally turns out to also stand for gas, in this case onsite gas turbines, with not much concern for the climate or local air pollution risks. (Or for the amount of water required—here’s a recent account from Brad Reed of a single Pennsylvania data center that will use 40% of the town’s excess water). Here’s a kind of worst-case scenario from John Kostyack, a DC-based consultant:
By the end of this decade, capital spending by tech, real estate, and utility companies will likely represent the largest private-sector infrastructure spending spree in world history. McKinsey, for example, estimates a whopping $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030.
Although forecasts of the scale of data center buildout vary widely, anything near this projected scale has enormous climate implications. The most obvious concern is the emissions generated in powering the massive hyperscale complexes, which are being designed to consume as much as 2 gigawatts (GWs) of power–roughly 15 times the capacity required by the entire city of Philadelphia during summer peak load. According to energy analyst Rystand’s 2025 review of industry announcements, data centers consuming up to 100 GWs of power could come online in the next 10 years.
Much of this power would come from gas-fired power plants. Researchers at Urgewald estimate that roughly 37% of the gas plant capacity proposed in the last 2 years is linked to data centers and AI infrastructure. Thanks in significant part to data centers, the US has overtaken China as the world’s largest developer of gas plants, with 125 GWs of planned new capacity, up 120% from 2024.
Faced with this level of speculative craziness, local opponents and an increasing number of national groups are calling for a moratorium on the buildout of data centers. As Jenna Ruddock wrote in December:
Confronted with similar stakes, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake. From Maryland to Missouri, at least 14 states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development. In early December, over 200 groups—from faith groups in Florida and Louisiana to physicians in Texas—publicly called for a moratorium on new data center construction nationwide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the highest profile Democrat-aligned politician to join the call for a moratorium, but as Politico reported in January it’s been hard to find others who are quite as outspoken. Most temporized—for instance, Rep Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), running for Senate, said AI “can bring real economic opportunity to Texas,” but “we must demand transparency, accountability, and responsible growth.”
But this is very soft ground for politicians, who haven’t found their footing yet. Late last week Sanders joined California Rep. Ro Khanna for conversations with AI executives; he emerged to tell a Stanford audience:
Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.
It seems to me that the call for a moratorium is sound; we should pause before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere. Whether that’s possible is not clear. The Trump administration, amid its myriad corruptions, is making the case that we must keep ahead of China. What that means is unclear: The Chinese are indeed building AIs of their own, but they seem to be developing architectures that use less energy. And of course they are building out huge amounts of clean electricity, to use for transit and heating and, if they want, artificial intelligence. So far the big difference with the Chinese models is that they’re transparent and open. Which, by the way, complicates the task of American AI entrepreneurs who want to get rich via their proprietary systems.
That getting rich part, of course, now means using AI to try and game our politics, and indeed in recent weeks a new generation of AI-fueled bots seem to be infecting our political system. An AI platform apparently managed to generate 20,000 comments telling California regulators to ignore air quality concerns:
Environmental and public health advocates are calling on California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate an AI-powered campaign that allegedly submitted public comments attributed to residents without their consent to oppose Southern California clean air standards. The extent of the AI astroturf campaign remains unknown—who funded it, whose identities were used without consent, and whether California law was broken. Watch the press conference recording here.
The call follows a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing how CiviClick, an AI-powered advocacy platform, was used to generate more than 20,000 public comments opposing standards proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). When staff at the AQMD followed up with a sample of people to verify comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency or had knowledge of the message.
Even so, the campaign for a data center moratorium seems to be gathering steam—one of the most recent pushes emerged in New York State where Third Act’s organizing director Michael Richardson was among the proponents. He said, quite sensibly I think:
At a time when New York State should be leading the rapid transition to solar and wind energy generation while also ending further buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure, the permitting of data centers with massive energy needs will only feed into the fossil fuel industry’s narrative that to keep this technology running we have to put a pause on dealing with climate change for now. The pause should be the one put on the data centers—not renewable energy projects.”
Indeed, if we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. But in the politically charged year in which we find ourselves, I think intelligence requires us to slow down.
A real shoutout, as I close, to the 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who last week turned down a $15 million offer for his land from a data center developer, instead giving it to a land conservancy for $2 million. Let’s give Mervin Raudabaugh the final word:
“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.
“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular