U.S. President Donald Trump says he is discussing legislation with Senate Majority Leader John Thune that would seek to protect households from electricity-price increases linked to the rapid expansion of data centers.
Reuters reported that Trump said Friday he was “talking to” Thune about bringing the legislation forward after the House overwhelmingly backed the proposal earlier in the week.
The Economic Times said the Republican-majority House approved the Ratepayer Protection Act by 417 votes to 3. The measure would require state utility regulators to consider whether large electricity users, including data centers, should bear the incremental costs of new power infrastructure built to serve them.
Data center growth is colliding with electricity bills
The proposal arrives as lawmakers from both parties face constituent concerns about electricity costs associated with surging data-center power demand.
Under the House-passed bill, state regulators would examine whether large users such as data centers should take on more of the cost of substations, transmission capacity and other infrastructure required to connect them to the grid rather than spreading those costs across ordinary ratepayers.
That distinction matters for the economics of AI infrastructure.
Building a data center is only part of the investment. Large computing facilities can also require utilities to expand generation and grid capacity around them. The Ratepayer Protection Act focuses on how those additional costs should be allocated rather than restricting data-center construction itself.
Senate passage remains uncertain
The legislation has cleared the House, but its path through the Senate is not settled.
The Economic Times reported that Republican Senator Jon Husted, the bill’s sponsor, attempted to secure a Senate vote through unanimous consent on Thursday. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, blocked the attempt and argued the bill relied too heavily on voluntary commitments from states and data-center developers.
Trump told reporters that he was discussing the measure with Thune but did not announce an agreement on when or how the Senate would take it up.
Trump still backs aggressive data center expansion
The push to protect households from infrastructure costs does not represent a retreat from the administration’s support for AI data centers.
Reuters reported that Trump continues to view data-center development as critical to U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. He said this week that data centers can make states and communities wealthier and described them as the oil of the next 20, 25 years.
At the same time, public resistance is becoming harder for policymakers and infrastructure developers to ignore. Reuters cited a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst poll finding that only 11% of Americans would support construction of an AI data center in their own community.
For technology companies, the debate highlights an increasingly important constraint on AI expansion: compute growth depends on physical infrastructure whose costs extend beyond the data-center campus.
The next phase of the AI infrastructure race may therefore depend not only on access to GPUs and capital, but on whether companies can secure enough electricity—and demonstrate that expanding the grid for their workloads will not leave households paying the bill.
