US President Donald Trump has vowed to force major technology companies to shoulder the cost of their growing electricity use, arguing that ordinary Americans should not see higher power bills because of data centers.
“I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers,” Trump wrote Tuesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump blamed Democrats for rising household electricity costs and said his administration would work with leading US tech firms to “secure their commitment to the American People,” promising an announcement in the coming weeks.
Electricity prices in the average US city have climbed about 40% over the past five years, according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The president added that Microsoft, which his team has been in talks with, will begin implementing major changes this week aimed at ensuring Americans do not “pick up the tab” for the company’s power consumption through higher utility bills.
“We are the ‘hottest’ country in the world, and number one in AI. Data centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans free and secure, but the big technology companies who build them must ‘pay their own way’.”
Data center power demand surges
In 2025, US data centers consumed about 5.2% of the nation’s total electricity—roughly 224 terawatt-hours (TWh)—marking a 21% increase from the prior year, according to Visual Capitalist.
Looking ahead, McKinsey & Company projects that US data center electricity use could exceed 600 TWh by 2030, accounting for nearly 11.7% of total national power consumption.
Energy use within data centers is heavily concentrated in cooling and computing. Cooling systems account for an estimated 30% to 40% of total facility energy use, while servers and other IT equipment consume roughly 40% to 60%, according to Network Installers.
At the same time, the International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI-focused data centers is growing at an annual rate of about 30%, far outpacing the roughly 9% growth seen in traditional server workloads.
Bitcoin mining power usage
Bitcoin mining is another energy-intensive activity, relying on large-scale data centers to perform the computations required to secure the network and generate new blocks.
However, ESG analyst Daniel Batten recently compared the rise in US electricity bills from 2021 to 2024 with trends in Texas—a state with a particularly high concentration of Bitcoin mining operations—and found the increases to be broadly similar.
Batten concluded that “neither the data nor peer-reviewed studies provide evidence to support the claim that Bitcoin mining increases power bills for consumers.”
He also noted that Bitcoin mining has several documented environmental benefits, including helping to alleviate grid bottlenecks for renewable energy, supporting investment in green energy research and development, and reducing harmful methane emissions.
