[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] The Trump administration and 13 state governors in the United States are pursuing a plan for private Big Tech companies to share the cost of building power plants to ease electricity shortages at data centers.

According to foreign media including The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch, the White House asked PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. power grid operator, to hold an “emergency auction.”

Through the auction, data center operators including Apple, Microsoft and Meta would pre-contract electricity they will use over the next 15 years and pay for newly built power plants to secure it. The contract size is expected to be at least $15 billion.

With electricity demand from data centers surging amid the recent AI boom, PJM’s power market is in a situation where the pace of retirements of generation facilities is outpacing expansions of new capacity. As a result, PJM’s recent capacity auctions have repeatedly seen supply shortfalls and prices hitting the cap, leading to heavier burdens on consumers’ power bills.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the move is aimed at reducing burdens on U.S. households and reviving manufacturing competitiveness, and criticized rising electricity rates as a result of the Biden administration’s clean energy policy. Former President Donald Trump also publicly welcomed Microsoft’s statement that it would finance power costs for its data centers on its own.

In a separate statement, PJM said it is seeking ways to meet electricity demand in a balanced way for both data centers and other customers, and presented measures including short-term supply-demand auctions, improved demand forecasting and encouraging self-generation.