Trump says he’ll make tech firms pay for power. They’d love to

US President Donald Trump is calling for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that, his administration says, will force technology companies to pay for the new power they need to run massive AI data centers under construction across the country.

The truth is Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI and all the other major tech firms behind the AI data center boom are more than happy to shell out for more electricity generation. And they have been.  

“They have no shortage of money,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana of the tech giants powering the global artificial intelligence race. “They really don’t have a problem with funding this thing.” Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars on capital investments annually, far exceeding the budgets of the entire utility segment.

Data center developers have in fact already said they’d like to buy electricity off the nation’s power grids as opposed to signing contr...