(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump is advocating an emergency wholesale electricity auction that his administration says would force technology companies to pay for the new power they need to run the massive AI data centers being built across the country.
The truth is that Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI and all the other big tech companies behind the AI data center boom are more than willing to shell out resources to scale up electricity generation. And they are already doing that.
“They have no shortage of money,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana said of the technology giants driving the global race for artificial intelligence. “They really have no problem financing it.” Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta together spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on capital investments, far above the budgets of the entire utilities sector.
Take advantage of the stock market rise!
In fact, data center developers have already been saying that they prefer to buy energy directly from the country’s electricity grids, rather than signing contracts directly with generators. This is because network charges can be cheaper, networks have backup capabilities, and these systems help stabilize supply during extreme weather events. Hyperscalers (or hyperscalers, large-scale cloud providers) have also signed contracts to restart nuclear plants or build new ones.
One way or another, the reality is that technology companies have been trying to secure power from all possible sources — both online and off-grid — as energy demand for data centers is expected to triple by 2035.
Continues after advertising
“We agree that data centers should pay their own way,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg. “For us, that’s the basics.” Amazon’s top lawyer, David Zapolsky, also praised Trump’s plan in a LinkedIn post, describing it as a way to address the “challenges of an outdated electrical grid in America.”
By defending the auction, Trump may be solving a public relations problem for technology companies, according to analysts.
The sector and its energy suppliers have been criticized for rising electricity bills and the possible environmental impacts of new plants. An auction like the one proposed by Trump would allow these companies to bypass political resistance to individual projects.
“This may be a quicker way to just attack the problem, rather than dealing with all of this resistance and associated problems,” said Paul Patterson, utilities analyst at Glenrock Associates LLC.
Under Trump’s plan, grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC will hold an auction in which technology companies will compete for 15-year contracts for new power generation capacity. This type of contract is exactly what data center developers are looking for, offering “more stability, more certainty and more predictability about what the price will be,” Patterson said.
© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.
