David Sacks advocates for AI companies to fund grid upgrades, promising lower electricity bills

David Sacks wants the companies building the AI future to also foot the bill for powering it. The former White House AI and Crypto Czar, now co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has been pushing a straightforward proposition: if AI companies need massive amounts of electricity for their data centers, they should pay for the grid upgrades themselves rather than passing those costs to families. The Ratepayer Protection Pledge The centerpiece of Sacks’ push is the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” announced on March 5, 2026. Seven of the largest tech companies in the world signed on: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI. The pledge commits these firms to covering the costs of new power generation needed for their data centers. That means constructing new generation capacity, upgrading infrastructure, and, crucially, remaining liable for any capacity they build but don’t end up using. Sacks has argued the arrangement could actually lower electricity rates for nearby communities. The logic: data centers need reliable, large-scale power generation. When those facilities produce more electricity than the AI workloads consume, the exce...