America`s AI land rush is running a 19th-century playbook

In March, seven of the country’s biggest tech companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI — gathered at the White House to sign something called the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” It’s a voluntary commitment in which the companies promise to cover the cost of new power plants and grid upgrades for their data centers, rather than passing those costs on to other utility customers.  

Leading the meeting, President Donald Trump said the pledge would bring down ordinary Americans’ power bills “very, very substantially.” Trump also described the pledge bluntly as “some PR help” for companies encountering local opposition to data-center builds...