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President Donald Trump did what he does on Monday evening and posted to his social media app, this time about how Microsoft isn’t going to cause our bills to spike by creating massive amounts of new energy demand with its AI projects.
First of all, the president claims to “never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” which is a nice thought, although someone should tell him it looks like the thing he dreads has already happened. At any rate, what he’s teasing with Microsoft is, he claims, the first of multiple energy-related projects with big tech companies. To that end, he writes:
“First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying 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.’ Thank you, and congratulations to Microsoft. More to come soon! President DJT”
As Gizmodo wrote last summer, electricity demand from the massive data centers that are being used to train and run AI models has driven the average American’s power bill up, and the amount varies from place to place. On average, consumer energy bills had gone up about 6.5% in a year when that story emerged over the summer, but in, for instance, Maine, they had spiked by an astonishing 36.3%, and that’s reportedly due to the “AI tax.” Meanwhile, utility companies like Pacific Gas & Electric have reported record profits in recent years. Funny how that works.
It’s truly anyone’s guess how Trump and Microsoft are going to fix this issue. Trump is making overtures toward ostensible economic populism lately—seemingly in the form of deals he can tout for a short-term win, like when he got Novo Nordisk to lower the price of Ozempic. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee followed that mysterious deal up with a letter to Novo Nordisk asking about what might have been included in the still-secret terms of that agreement—including some unsettling ambiguity about the future prices of other drugs. But who wants to hear about the puny Democrats’ dumb letter when President Deals successfully slashed the price of what he has nicknamed “the fat drug”?
But keeping energy bills down is tricky for Microsoft to do since, unlike Novo Nordisk, Microsoft doesn’t actually set the price Trump is trying to keep down. One thing Trump could have demanded of Microsoft, then, is that Microsoft simply subsidize everyone’s energy bills. That would do the trick, but last I checked Microsoft wasn’t a charity.
It was reported six days ago, however, that Microsoft is already working with the Midcontinent Independent System on a project aimed at modernizing the power grid with Microsoft’s technology. Reuters writes that Microsoft’s tech will help with “predicting and responding to weather-related power grid disruptions, transmission line planning, and accelerating certain operations.”
This doesn’t sound like a slam dunk for bringing down energy costs dramatically, but it’s easy to imagine broader grid modernization at least dispersing the price spikes more evenly, or even helping to integrate unused renewable energy and ease the famous bottlenecks cause by the outdated energy grid. But is this, or something like it, what Trump is referring to? For his own sake I hope not, because it sounds like the type of confusing and convoluted plan more typically associated with flailing Democrats, not with Mr. Cheap Ozempic.
Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft and the White House for further details about this plan. We will update if we hear back.
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