President Donald Trump did what he does on Monday evening and posted to his social media app, this time about how Microsoft isn’t going to trigger our payments to spike by creating huge quantities of recent power demand with its AI tasks.
To begin with, the president claims to “by no means need Individuals to pay increased Electrical energy payments due to Information Facilities,” which is a pleasant thought, though somebody ought to inform him it seems just like the factor he dreads has already occurred. At any fee, what he’s teasing with Microsoft is, he claims, the primary of a number of energy-related tasks with huge tech corporations. To that finish, he writes:
“First up is Microsoft, who my workforce has been working with, and which is able to make main adjustments starting this week to make sure that Individuals don’t ‘choose up the tab’ for his or her POWER consumption, within the type of paying increased Utility payments. We’re the ‘HOTTEST’ Nation within the World, and Quantity One in AI. Information Facilities are key to that growth, and holding Individuals FREE and SECURE however, the massive Expertise Corporations who construct them should ‘pay their very own approach.’ Thanks, and congratulations to Microsoft. Extra to come back quickly! President DJT”
As Gizmodo wrote last summer, electrical energy demand from the large information facilities which can be getting used to coach and run AI fashions has pushed the typical American’s energy invoice up, and the quantity varies from place to position. On common, shopper power payments had gone up about 6.5% in a yr when that story emerged over the summer time, however in, for example, Maine, they’d spiked by an astonishing 36.3%, and that’s reportedly because of the “AI tax.” In the meantime, utility companies like Pacific Gas & Electric have reported file earnings lately. Humorous how that works.
It’s actually anybody’s guess how Trump and Microsoft are going to repair this situation. Trump is making overtures towards ostensible financial populism currently—seemingly within the type of offers he can tout for a short-term win, like when he got Novo Nordisk to lower the price of Ozempic. Democrats on the Home Methods and Means Committee followed that mysterious deal up with a letter to Novo Nordisk asking about what might need been included within the still-secret phrases of that settlement—together with some unsettling ambiguity in regards to the future costs of different medicine. However who needs to listen to in regards to the puny Democrats’ dumb letter when President Offers efficiently slashed the worth of what he has nicknamed “the fats drug”?
However holding power payments down is hard for Microsoft to do since, not like Novo Nordisk, Microsoft doesn’t really set the worth Trump is attempting to maintain down. One factor Trump might have demanded of Microsoft, then, is that Microsoft merely subsidize everybody’s power payments. That will do the trick, however final I checked Microsoft wasn’t a charity.
It was reported six days in the past, nonetheless, that Microsoft is already working with the Midcontinent Impartial System on a challenge geared toward modernizing the power grid with Microsoft’s technology. Reuters writes that Microsoft’s tech will assist with “predicting and responding to weather-related energy grid disruptions, transmission line planning, and accelerating sure operations.”
This doesn’t sound like a slam dunk for bringing down power prices dramatically, but it surely’s straightforward to think about broader grid modernization at the least dispersing the worth spikes extra evenly, and even serving to to integrate unused renewable energy and ease the well-known bottlenecks trigger by the outdated power grid. However is that this, or one thing prefer it, what Trump is referring to? For his personal sake I hope not, as a result of it seems like the kind of complicated and convoluted plan more typically associated with flailing Democrats, not with Mr. Low-cost Ozempic.
Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft and the White Home for additional particulars about this plan. We’ll replace if we hear again.
