A White House pledge asks the companies building America’s data centers to promise something no regulator has ever required of them: covering every dollar of the power infrastructure their machines need, so the bill does not land on a household account instead. Two hundred sixty-three million Americans now live somewhere covered by that promise, and 317 companies, cooperatives, and utilities have signed it as of early September. What the pledge cannot do, because no White House document can, is set an actual electricity rate — that authority sits with state utility commissions, and those commissions are processing a record wave of rate-increase requests this year that have nothing to do with who signed what.
Five Promises, Written By The Companies That Would Have To Keep Them
The Ratepayer Protection Pledge asks each signatory to commit to five specific actions: building, bringing, or buying new power supply rather than drawing on the existing grid; paying for new delivery infrastructure themselves; voluntarily accepting new, separate rate structures; investing in local jobs where they build; and helping strengthen grid reliability during emergencies.
Two of the five sit closest to a household’s bill. Under Commitment II, signatories agree to cover all new delivery upgrades required to service their data centers, including network upgrade costs, “ensuring those expenses are not passed on to ordinary households.” Under Commitment III, companies agree to pay for the power and infrastructure brought online for them “whether or not they actually use the electricity” — a provision meant to stop a data center from reserving capacity and leaving ratepayers to cover it if plans change.
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From a March Rollout to a September Count of 317
The White House first published the pledge in March 2026, when it was signed by a smaller group anchored by seven of the largest hyperscalers and AI companies. By September 2, 2026, the date the White House’s own tracking page was last updated, the roster had grown to 317 organizations: 207 electric cooperatives, 71 utilities, and 40 data-center developers, plus 23 state governors who signed on separately as the officials who oversee utility regulation in their states. The page credits that coalition with covering 263 million Americans — 75 percent of the country’s population — and roughly 80 percent of the power delivered to American homes and businesses.
No Regulator Signed This Pledge
The White House’s own page acknowledges the obvious question about a voluntary commitment: what happens if a company does not keep it? “Skeptics — including The Wall Street Journal — questioned whether the pledge could be enforced, given that power prices are set by state regulators, electricity buyers, and electricity sellers,” the page states. That is a fair description of how electricity pricing actually works. A residential rate is set through a state public utility commission proceeding, not a federal pledge, and a commission’s order — not a signature on a White House list — is the only document that can force a utility to absorb a cost rather than pass it to ratepayers.
The Rate Requests Already Moving Through State Commissions
While the pledge’s signature count climbed, the rate cases that actually set household bills kept moving on a separate track. Investor-owned utilities sought $18.6 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2026 alone, according to an analysis by the consumer advocacy nonprofit PowerLines — on top of $31 billion requested in all of 2025, itself more than double the $15 billion requested in 2024. The second quarter of 2026 set its own record, with $9.2 billion in requests affecting more than 56 million customers. None of this is presented as a consequence of the pledge; the filings are driven mainly by aging infrastructure replacement, grid hardening, and data-center load growth broadly, and many predate the pledge’s later signatories entirely. The figures simply show why a voluntary promise about future data-center costs does little to slow rate cases already in front of regulators today.
Those regulators have not been stingy. Between 2023 and 2024, state commissions approved roughly 58 percent of the dollar value of rate requests put in front of them, according to PowerLines data incorporated into a July 2026 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory update — a sustained approval level that keeps pressure on household bills even as the pledge’s coverage numbers grow.
What $18.6 Billion Looks Like on a Monthly Bill
The clearest measure of where this leaves ratepayers comes from a Department of Energy-funded report Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The Brattle Group published in April 2026: from 2019 to 2025, the nominal price of a kilowatt-hour rose 33 percent for residential customers, compared with 26 percent for commercial customers and 27 percent for industrial customers. The researchers concluded that record levels of utility rate requests and regulatory approvals point toward further near-term price increases “absent policy or market actions” — a conclusion reached independently of, and unaffected by, how many companies have signed a voluntary pledge in the meantime.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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