The White House is massively expanding its Ratepayer Protection Pledge — the voluntary commitment that AI's power bills shouldn't land on households. Nearly 200 additional entities have signed, the Wall Street Journal reported July 22 and a White House official confirmed, ahead of a formal announcement set for Thursday with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
Who signed
The new wave spans the nation's biggest utilities and data-center developers — NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, Equinix, Digital Realty — plus electricity co-ops, public power providers, and Republican governors of Louisiana, Georgia, Nebraska and Idaho. They join the March originals: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI.
The 80% claim
With the expansion, the White House says the pledge now covers 80% of the power delivered to US homes and businesses — its own figure, not independently verified.
What it actually commits
Signatories promise to "build, bring, or buy" new generation for their data centers and pay for all power-delivery infrastructure upgrades serving them, negotiating separate rate structures with utilities and states. It is entirely voluntary, with no enforcement mechanism — and retail electricity pricing remains the province of state regulators.
The pressure behind it
Residential rates are up roughly 25% over four years and 7.4% year over year, with data centers increasingly blamed in state rate cases — and forecasters expect data-center electricity use to roughly quadruple by 2035. The pledge is the administration's bet that promises can defuse a ratepayer revolt before it hardens into legislation; skeptics counter that a document nobody enforces protects nobody's bill.