> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.
People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.
It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3
The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?
Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.
This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.
Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.
They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".
Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".
No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.
It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.
edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.
They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.
This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...
Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water sources? Let’s be honest - these pledges are theater that reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and get back this deceptive theater show.
Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.
The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.
If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.
Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
Claude:
“To your main question — is a pledge a legal document?
Generally, no. A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract. The agreement doesn’t appear to carry any concrete, binding commitments. There’s no penalty mechanism or enforcement structure the way a contract would have.“
Using Claude to provide a legal definition of "pledge" is unconvincing at best.
> What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
To answer that question is to first agree upon the legal definition of "pledge":
pledge
v. to deposit personal property as security for a personal
loan of money. If the loan is not repaid when due, the
personal property pledged shall be forfeit to the lender.
The property is known as collateral. To pledge is the same
as to pawn. 2) to promise to do something.[0]
Without careful review of the document signed, it is impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable in this case.
> A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract.
This very well may be incorrect in this context and serves an exemplar as to why relying upon statistical document generation is not a recommended legal strategy.
No, this is not my goal. My goal was to illuminate that Claude is a product which produces the most statistically relevant content to a prompt submitted therein.
> I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?
The post to which I originally replied cited "Claude" as if it were an authoritative source. To which I disagreed and then provided a definition from law.com. Where is my failure?
> Law.com's first definition is inapplicable.
From the article:
The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to
bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters,
either from new power plants or existing plants with
expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from
big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and
to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities.[0]
> That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.
To which I originally wrote:
Without careful review of the document signed, it is
impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable
in this case.
Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.
Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.
Thus ended your research.
I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.
Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.
> Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response.
"Less useful" is subjective and I shall not contend. "Less thought out" is laughable as I possess the ability to think and "Claude" does not.
> Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.
The LLM-based service generated a statistically relevant document to the prompt given in which you, presumably a human, interpreted said document as being "actually answers the question". This is otherwise known as anthropomorphism[0].
> Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do.
It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway.
Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they were probably going to do regardless, because colocating large data centers with power plants saves the expense of power transmission which lowers their costs.
And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase. They temporarily cause demand to exceed supply until supply has time to catch up. So on the one hand the whole issue is kind of meh because it was only ever going to be a temporary price increase anyway, and on the other hand having them build power plants at the same rate anybody else is building power plants doesn't actually change anything or address the temporary shortfall. (If you really want to solve it, find a way to build power generation capacity faster.)
And then it doesn't matter if you can enforce the promise because they're just promising to do things they were going to do anyway.
> And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.
Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.
Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken. It's certainly possible, we don't need to be cynical.
> Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken.
You're looking at the the conditional the wrong way. You want to look at how often pledges lead to "company civic greatness" (or even, you know, anything net positive) to start guessing at the value of a given pledge.
I'd be cautious about using Claude, given that they're designated as a supply chain risk by the US Government. Why not use the approved and officially certified ChatGPT instead?
I don't think there's any mechanism in US law for anyone to make a binding promise about terms they plan to include in contracts they might sign with unspecified local governments in the future.
Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.
| Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.
... plus it would require "tech firms" to actually modify their behaviour and that would never do.
> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order regarding it is at [1].
There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...
It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
This absolutely cannot backfire. /s
What’s wrong with this?
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
Fear not citizen! Ya boi Elon got you covered with the new Megablock.
Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now that's innovation.
See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?
Tesla’s Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...
Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.
People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.
It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3
This is USA so we all know that those techs companies won't pay a cent back at the end, but the population will.
The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.
> The tech companies don't really have any issue paying
It reduces profit.
Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)?
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.
When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.
There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal and you'll enjoy it!
They have a cute mascot, so it can't be that bad: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/meet-coal...
Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...
/s this guy gets it. Thank you, finally speaking my language
Sound and particulate pollution too.
While we're at it, water use is another externality.
Strange downvotes for a relevant question.
We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.
Public investment yields private dividends.
"The invisible hand" of free markets has become truly invisible...
Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?
Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.
This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
Can I pledge to pay taxes?
Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service
Stealing from the people; enriching myself
oh well if they pledge it's okay then!
They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.
Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and see what happens to your energy bills…
It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them
That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.
True but they will focus their market on the every enriching 0.1% that will have all the money.
The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw instances, so AI's currently buying and selling goods and services.
As long as they promised. Their word is golden
I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.
Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.
They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".
Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".
No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.
It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.
edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.
They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.
This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...
that could happen because the demand could rise even more.
Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
Like trickle down economics? Fool me once ...
I've read so many of these pledges before.... tl'dr: no, they won't
The only people who believes corpo jackoffery these days are either boomers or people investing their remaining money in big line go up
Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water sources? Let’s be honest - these pledges are theater that reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and get back this deceptive theater show.
Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.
The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.
If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.
Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
Claude:
“To your main question — is a pledge a legal document? Generally, no. A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract. The agreement doesn’t appear to carry any concrete, binding commitments. There’s no penalty mechanism or enforcement structure the way a contract would have.“
Using Claude to provide a legal definition of "pledge" is unconvincing at best.
> What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
To answer that question is to first agree upon the legal definition of "pledge":
Without careful review of the document signed, it is impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable in this case.> A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract.
This very well may be incorrect in this context and serves an exemplar as to why relying upon statistical document generation is not a recommended legal strategy.
0 - https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1544
> For a personal loan of money
The seven are doing some fancy accounting to pay for their data centers, but I don’t think Larry, Sergey and others are taking out personal loans.
Wait, we know it’s not your definition, because it’s inapplicable.
> Wait, we know it’s not your definition ...
Of course it is not "my definition", as I cited the source of it.
> ... because it’s inapplicable.
Take that up with law.com.
Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude. I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?
Law.com's first definition is inapplicable. That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.
> Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude.
No, this is not my goal. My goal was to illuminate that Claude is a product which produces the most statistically relevant content to a prompt submitted therein.
> I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?
The post to which I originally replied cited "Claude" as if it were an authoritative source. To which I disagreed and then provided a definition from law.com. Where is my failure?
> Law.com's first definition is inapplicable.
From the article:
> That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.To which I originally wrote:
0 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/04/us-tech-comp...This is exhausting. Claude read the article.
Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.
Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.
Thus ended your research.
I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.
Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.
Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response. Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.
> Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response.
"Less useful" is subjective and I shall not contend. "Less thought out" is laughable as I possess the ability to think and "Claude" does not.
> Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.
The LLM-based service generated a statistically relevant document to the prompt given in which you, presumably a human, interpreted said document as being "actually answers the question". This is otherwise known as anthropomorphism[0].
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
The AI slop is still slop in any context.
Is it the same kind of pledge as alluded to in the Amber Heard trial?
Pledges are somewhere between a pinky swear and a high five.
Fingers crossed spit shake
It's a PR exercise that makes both the companies and the administration feel good. Not more. There will be no or just cosmetic change.
You can just use a traditional search engine for this. I have no interest in reading your LLM output.
> Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?
That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do.
It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway.
Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they were probably going to do regardless, because colocating large data centers with power plants saves the expense of power transmission which lowers their costs.
And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase. They temporarily cause demand to exceed supply until supply has time to catch up. So on the one hand the whole issue is kind of meh because it was only ever going to be a temporary price increase anyway, and on the other hand having them build power plants at the same rate anybody else is building power plants doesn't actually change anything or address the temporary shortfall. (If you really want to solve it, find a way to build power generation capacity faster.)
And then it doesn't matter if you can enforce the promise because they're just promising to do things they were going to do anyway.
> And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.
Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.
https://electrek.co/2026/03/03/elon-musk-xai-data-center-und...
considering how we uphold treaties im not sure the terminology matters one way or the other
Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken. It's certainly possible, we don't need to be cynical.
The thing about the old days is, they’s the old days.
And yes this particular group of professional liars provide every reason to be cynical.
> Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken.
You're looking at the the conditional the wrong way. You want to look at how often pledges lead to "company civic greatness" (or even, you know, anything net positive) to start guessing at the value of a given pledge.
I'd be cautious about using Claude, given that they're designated as a supply chain risk by the US Government. Why not use the approved and officially certified ChatGPT instead?
I'm assuming there's a missing /s tag there.
I don't think there's any mechanism in US law for anyone to make a binding promise about terms they plan to include in contracts they might sign with unspecified local governments in the future.
Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.
| Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.
... plus it would require "tech firms" to actually modify their behaviour and that would never do.