U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that large technology companies must cover the full cost of electricity used by their data centers, a stance that could also ripple into energy-intensive sectors like crypto mining.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said his administration is in direct talks with Microsoft, adding that the company is set to announce “major changes” this week. The goal, he said, is to stop rising power demand from data centers, driven largely by AI and cloud computing, from pushing household electricity bills even higher.
“I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.” Donald Trump.
US Electricity Costs Climb, Raising Questions for Bitcoin Miners
Electricity prices in the US have already climbed much faster than overall inflation. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that average electricity costs per kilowatt-hour in US cities are up by about 40% over the past five years.
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Trump said data centers are essential for America’s AI growth but stressed that big tech firms should not pass those energy costs onto ordinary consumers. “The big Technology Companies who build data centers must pay their own way,” he said.
For the crypto industry, the comments may carry wider implications. Bitcoin mining and other proof-of-work activities rely heavily on large-scale data infrastructure and cheap electricity. If regulators tighten pressure on energy usage or force higher costs on operators, mining economics, especially in the US, could face new challenges.
Cryptocurrency mining is still a huge electricity consumer, just like it was before. In the beginning of 2024, the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) said that crypto mining used about 0.6%-2.3% of the total electricity in the U.S.
But then, last week, Daniel Batten, an ESG analyst, said that if you measure Bitcoin per transaction, then it doesn’t put a lot of burden on the energy, water, and electronic waste categories. He backed up his statement with four peer-reviewed studies that showed Bitcoin’s resource consumption is not a direct function of the number of transactions that the network is handling.
