By Ella Nilsen, CNN
(CNN) — As an electricity crunch drives bills higher around the country, big tech companies building power-hungry data centers are increasingly offering to pay for more of the energy they consume, so everyday people don’t get stuck with the bill.
At least, that is the message from seven large tech companies in new letters responding to three Senate Democrats’ investigation into how data center buildout nationwide is impacting electricity prices. But while these companies can make commitments, there are few regulations to ensure those promises are kept.
In mid-Atlantic states especially, a sudden boom in data center growth combined with a lack of new power to supply them has caused sharp electricity bill spikes in states including Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and the District of Columbia. Around the country, certain areas where data centers were built saw electricity costs jump as much as 267% compared to five years ago, a 2025 Bloomberg News analysis found.
Seven companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Coreweave, Equinix and Digital Realty, responded to questions from the senators on how many data centers they had, how much power those facilities needed, and how they plan to procure and pay for that power.
Some companies made commitments to foot the bill. In its letter to Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Google said it would pay for all of the electricity it would use to power its fleet of data centers and would make changes to how it manages and pays for energy use when the grid’s power usage is at its highest, a time period when data center power use can drive up prices for other customers.
Similarly, Meta said it would pay for the “full costs for energy used by our data centers” as well as funding “new and upgraded local infrastructure,” and adding new power to the grid, in a statement to CNN.
“We’ve been committed to these principles for many years and welcome recent pushes from other companies,” Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesperson, told CNN.
Microsoft made similar commitments last week.
In addition, several other tech companies wrote that they would support being put into a different class of electricity ratepayers that would be charged more for power than residents or other smaller commercial customers.
But the letters, provided first to CNN, offer few specifics on how exactly companies will implement these promises. Data companies are optimistic. Representatives from both Digital Realty and Equinix told CNN that they were looking forward to collaborations with elected officials, as well as the public and private sector, that would make positive change happen.
But details remain thin. “These commitments do not explain how Big Tech companies – not American consumers – will bear the full cost of data centers,” Warren said in a statement.
It is exceedingly difficult to know exactly how much big tech companies are actually paying electrical utilities for the power they consume. That’s because there are often secret contracts inked between utilities and data centers, rather than a public rate case, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Law School’s electricity law initiative.
“The devil is really in the details here,” and consumers don’t have much protection with the current system, Peskoe told CNN.
Warren and the other senators argued in statements that even after com