On October 21, former U.S. President Donald Trump posted a statement on his social media platform, Truth Social. He declared that new, large-scale data centers would be required to generate their own electricity—with any surplus power to be supplied or sold to the local community or the broader power grid.
In the same post, he further suggested that if data centers wish to be welcomed by local communities, they should pay a "dividend" to the area and its residents.
As of October 22 (Japan Standard Time), no official legal actions or supplementary guidance have been issued by the White House, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); therefore, this does not constitute an executive order or an official regulation. No implementation date, criteria for defining "new, large-scale data centers," regulatory authority, or penalties have been specified, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that no details regarding how such a policy would function were provided. It is more accurate to interpret this as an expression of intent rather than a formal mandate.
Nevertheless, there was some groundwork for this. In March, the administration introduced a "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" via a presidential proclamation, calling on hyperscalers (major cloud service providers) and AI companies to secure their own power supplies. However, this was merely a voluntary "pledge" with no binding force. Even so, by the summer, participation had expanded to include utility companies and individual states—covering, according to the White House, 80% of the electricity supply in the United States. Meanwhile, a legislative attempt to codify similar requirements passed the House of Representatives with near-unanimous support, but it stalled in the Senate at the end of September, falling three votes short of the 60-vote threshold required to proceed to a vote.
This appears to be driven by the pressure of the numbers: according to estimates by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), electricity consumption by data centers in the United States could grow to more than three times its 2023 level by 2028. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that residential electricity rates will rise by approximately 5% this year alone. Meanwhile, a Gallup survey indicates that 70% of people oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities.
Conversely, a report titled "Data Center Dividends," released in September by the think tank Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), estimates that a rural county hosting a massive 1-gigawatt (GW) facility could generate enough revenue from existing property taxes to distribute between $4,500 and $8,900 annually per household. The report also notes that efforts to halt the construction of data centers in local areas have increased nearly 50-fold over the past two years.
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