Big Tech makes White House pledge to stump up for the increased energy costs of AI and prevent household bills from escalating

Big Tech makes White House pledge to stump up for the increased energy costs of AI and prevent household bills from escalating | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these AI DeepSeek has reportedly denied Nvidia and AMD early access to its new V4 AI model, giving Huawei and other Chinese chipmakers a head start Gaming Industry Microsoft’s execs can’t stop hooting and hollering about AI, but Xbox’s new overlords promise ‘We’ve got no pressure’ from up top that would ‘flood our ecosystem with slop’ AI ‘We shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday’: OpenAI hastily amends the terms of its controversial deal with the US Department of War as CEO Sam Altman claims it’s been a ‘good learning experience’ Hardware Nvidia reports a truly astonishing $193.7 billion in annual data center revenue in its latest earnings call, up 75% year on year, while little old gaming brought in $16 billion AI Reports claim an AWS outage last year was caused by an AI coding tool deciding to ‘delete and recreate the environment’ from scratch, while Amazon says ‘misconfigured access controls’ were to blame Memory Explainer: The RAMpocalypse is making memory, SSDs, and even GPUs much more expensive, and it’s all down to AI AI OpenAI announces another $110 billion in investment funding including $30 billion from Nvidia, but says Microsoft is still its best friend forever AI Anthropic ditches its defining safety promise to pause dangerous AI development because it’s basically pointless when everybody else is ‘blazing ahead’ AI Anthropic is standing up to the US Department of War and refusing to remove AI autonomous weapon and mass surveillance safeguards: ‘We cannot in good conscience accede to their request’ AI ‘The compute bottleneck is massively under appreciated’ says Google AI Studio lead: ‘I would guess the gap between supply and demand is growing [by a] single digit % every day’ AI Microsoft CEO warns that we must ‘do something useful’ with AI or they’ll lose ‘social permission’ to burn electricity on it Graphics Cards In yet another twist in the US-China chip export fiasco, it seems like America may limit the number of H200 AI chips being sent to China Games Microsoft’s ties with ICE come under fire amidst allegations that the company’s cloud and AI technology are being used to support mass surveillance of US citizens Hardware ‘I think the fact that everything is scarce is fantastic for us’ says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ‘…in a world of constraint, you have no choice but to choose the best’ AI Steam updates AI disclosure form to specify that it’s focused on AI-generated content that is ‘consumed by players,’ not efficiency tools used behind the scenes PopularNEW: PC Gamer Clips!Resident EvilArc RaidersBest PC gearGame Quizzes Software AI Big Tech makes White House pledge to stump up for the increased energy costs of AI and prevent household bills from escalating News By Jeremy Laird published 5 March 2026 Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon et al agree to pay for new power generation at the White House. 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Signup + Every Wednesday Switch 2 Spotlight Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo’s new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play. Signup + Every Saturday The Watchlist Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and “several artificial intelligence companies” signed a pledge at the White House yesterday, dubbed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” to pay for the cost of powering their data centres, the Guardian reports. But there are questions over the legal authority of the pledge and what it will amount to in practice.The move reflects concerns in the US that the proliferation of data centres, driven largely by AI, is driving up the cost of electricity for home owners and businesses. “President Trump is calling on the leading United States hyperscalers and AI companies to build, bring, or buy all of the energy needed for building and operating data centers, paying the full cost of their energy and infrastructure, no matter what,” the White House statement on the Pledge said.“This means that the tech companies and the datacenters will be able to get the electricity they need, all without driving up electricity costs for consumers,” President Donald Trump said. You may like Trump announces that AI companies must ‘pay their own way’ for energy consumption to prevent consume