In a post to Truth Social on Saturday, President Donald J. Trump highlighted a plan to lower utility bills and help tech companies continue to grow.
Trump posted a clip from a podcast episode of All In, during which the hosts discussed a plan for data centers to pay more for electricity. Rising utility bills from data centers threaten the Republican majority in Congress and challenge US power grid operators and regulators.
“[A] bipartisan backlash against data centers has grown across the country, especially in areas seeing rising electricity bills,” E & E News reported earlier this month. “Elected officials are discussing new restrictions, and local resistance in 2025 forced companies to cancel some AI infrastructure projects, including a Microsoft development in Wisconsin.
“According to a report by Data Center Watch, some $98 billion in projects were blocked or delayed in just the second quarter of 2025, with even more affected in the second half of the year.”
Trump addressed the concerns earlier in January, saying that data centers “are key” to the artificial intelligence boom, but that the “big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”
During the All In episode, Jason Calacanis, entrepreneur and podcaster, said, “All right, Microsoft is going to pay its own way on data centers. We’ve been talking about this, um, you know, energy needs for AI data centers for a long time now, and there’s been this theme: hey if the data centers are going to take all this energy, it’s going to spike local power consumption.“
“On Monday, President Trump addressed this PR crisis on Truth Social, calling out Microsoft and never wanting Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers,” Calacanis explained.
He went on to say thatthat Microsoft had announced “major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t pick up the tab for their power consumption,” with company President Brad Smith saying “the company will pay higher electricity rates in areas where they are building data centers “to cover the cost of the new power generation and grid upgrades.”
Calacanisasked Chamath Palihapitiya, a Canadian-American entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of venture capital firm Social Capital, to weigh in.
“I really like it,” Palihapitiya said. “It’s a very good first order set of things to do, which is to step into a local area and take all of these energy issues off the table, at least to the extent that you’re contributing to it. The problem is that the data centers are only part of the problem.
“The reality is that we have a whole new way of living that is drawing more and more electrons. We are at a shortage for what we need. The reaction of the utilities is to now build — which is the right reaction. The problem is that for the last 20 years they’ve been underbuilding.”
Palihapitiya said that even if data centers are paying their fair share, “rates will still go up.”
He said all the “hyperscalers” should follow Microsoft’s example.
“I think it’s great that the president was able to get these guys to the table to agree to it,” Palihapitiya said. “What is the next major thing? The next major thing is when you actually create a hundred or $200 billion tax equity vehicle and you have them completely subsidize and pay for the electricity costs of homeowners.”
He said companies would help homeowners get solar and storage for their homes. This would “give them a social license to operate throughout the country.”
“…you tell the local residents, we’ll pay for the water, we’ll make sure there’s minimal noise, and we’ll make sure that we take absolutely no discount,” Palihapitiya said. “We pay our fair share even if it means paying more than you do for electricity. That’s step one.
“But now I think we need to go in with step two. Here is a bunch of money that we have allocated to go and fit your house out with solar, with storage, with next generation heat pumps, with a modern set of infrastructure so that you are totally resilient and now you are completely ambivalent to what the grid has to do in reaction to all the demand that’s coming.”
The clip that Trump posted took pieces of the conversation and put them together. In it, Palihapitiya starts by saying, “I think the president should try to create a three, four, 500 billion dollar tax equity fund and help eliminate the electricity costs of 50 to 100 million American households.”
“…If you actually go to solar and storage for every 15 million homes, you take a terawatt hour of demand off the grid. That’s an extra terawatt hour that you don’t need to build, … So, the reason why I like solar and storage is you make these folks so self-reliant. Now, all of a sudden, we’re actually catching up to China faster than we would have otherwise.”
Palihapitiya continued, “We actually get a two for one. The consumer homes don’t have that anxiety anymore. They don’t have the bill. And because they’re generating their own power, they’re off the grid. And now what that means is that extra terawatt hour can actually go to the commercial and industrial applications, including these data centers.
“The president preserved the ability to make those kinds of investments — and be tax advantaged for doing it —in the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Palihapitiya pointed out.
Calacanis said, “If we’re want to live in the age of abundance and we want to bring the bottom half of the country up and we want affordability, where do people spend their money? Food, groceries, their rent, and their electricity and the utilities. So, we if we want to figure out a direct way to do this, and for all the hippie- dippies who care about the environment and clean energy, this is a win there as well. And it doesn’t come out of Americans pockets and their taxes. It comes out of corporations which are printing money. If you want to talk about redistribution of wealth, this is a way for the great American Mag7 corporations to give something back to Americans.”
“Magnificent 7” (Mag7) refers to a group of seven high-performing and highly influential U.S. technology-focused companies that have significantly driven stock market performance in recent years. They include, Nvidia (AI chip and graphics processor maker), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), Amazon, and Tesla.
“We will look back and I think that we will want to have seen these big companies who are unbelievably profitable step up on behalf of American homeowners,” Palihapitiya says in the final clip from Trump’s post.
Trump’s Truth is below. To see the full All In conversation on the subject, scroll down to the You Tube video.
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