Trump’s AI Speech Hosts And Attendees: Clean Energy Is Key to Keeping Energy Costs Down

Washington, D.C. – Tomorrow, President Trump is giving a speech on AI, just weeks after gutting the clean energy production that the event’s hosts and attendees say they need to keep AI’s energy costs low. Just as energy demand from AI is soaring, Trump’s Republican Rate Hike took a sledgehammer to energy production, hiking costs, and pulling the plug on the data centers we need to beat China in the AI race. 

The event hosts who run the All-in podcast know it, the head of the organization hosting the event knows it, and the CEOS in attendance know it.

• All-In host and tech entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya said that without clean energy tax credits from the IRA, the U.S. would “lose the AI race.” Of Trump’s reconciliation bill, Palihapitiya said that  “You’re going to see energy prices spike. You’re gutting the number of electrons that will be available for things like AI.” […] “I think, unfortunately for President Trump’s Agenda and for the MAGA Movement, this is the worst of all conditions.” 

• All-In Host and tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis said that “Building a solar farm”… “is cheaper now than, forget about building a coal plant. Even like, refreshing a coal plant and maintaining it is becoming more expensive than just installing solar.” 
• All-In Host and Tech Entreprenur David Friedberg said that “…renewable energy production is one that everyone’s touting because we’re seeing industrial scale renewable energy, like solar and wind cost less now than traditional, petrochemical-driven electricity production, you know, as low as under three cents a kilowatt hour. And you know, we’re typically looking at about 10 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour for traditional coal and natural gas power. So, so if that technology is cheaper, then it is better, and the economy will move forward.”
• Jacob Helberg, Hill & Valley Forum Founder and Trump State Department Nominee: In 2024, Helberg agreed with an assessment calling for solar energy as an affordable way to meet data center-related energy demand, and said he hoped to elevate the issue in DC given its importance. 
• AMD CEO Lisa Su told the Senate Commerce Committee that “America leads when it moves fast and thinks big… it also means making AI compute infrastructure readily available across the industry. This will require rapidly building data centers at scale and powering them with reliable, affordable, and clean energy sources.”
• Hadrian CEO Chris Power said that “strength of the grid, clean power, and then the cheapness and scalability of that power really drive a lot of the decisions of where we put factories, where we put data centers in any advanced facility going into the American states.”

AI’s energy needs are increasing household energy costs, and costs will keep going up without clean energy. 

• Due to increased energy demand, AI data centers are projected to increase energy bills for consumers and small businesses by 70% in 2029.
• Fortune: Trump’s bill “is intentionally handicapping more easily and faster-built wind, solar, and battery storage projects that would help satiate the massive data-center power demands of the large-scale cloud-service providers known as hyperscalers. The final legislation”…“agrees to quickly unwind the clean-energy tax credits that could have helped strengthen an already stretched electric grid.
• AI companies are leading proponents of clean energy and have lobbied extensively against Republican efforts to gut federal investments in clean energy. In June 2025, the Data Center Coalition, which included Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, opposed the termination of clean energy investments.
• Trump’s tax bill will increase the average American family’s utility bill by $400 within a decade.
• Trump’s Republican Rate hike bill gutted federal support for wind, solar, and battery power, which together accounted for 94% of all the energy capacity added last year.
• Analysis by the nonpartisan Energy Innovation found that Trump’s bill would result in a loss of 340GW in new generation capacity from the grid by 2035. 
• Clean energy is the least expensive and quickest power generation source to add to the grid. 

AI Companies, energy companies, and their CEOs agree: clean energy is critical to keeping AI’s energy costs low.

• Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said that powering data centers with renewable energy would “drive down the cost of AI.” Microsoft has at least 22.5 GW of clean energy contracted for U.S. operations.

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI,  said that the future of AI depended on a “breakthrough” in clean energy technology, arguing  that “we need fusion or we need like radically cheaper solar plus storage or something at massive scale.” Altman led a $20 million seed round in solar developer Exowatt, a company founded to power AI data centers with clean energy.

• Google told a top federal energy regulator that “Google’s total electricity consumption in the United States alone was nearly 13 TWh in 2021. As our business grows, so too does our demand for reliable, affordable, and clean electricity.”
• Elon Musk, CEO of Telsa, called Trump’s dismantling of clean energy manufacturing “utter madness” that could “destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country,” and said that “solar power is so obviously the future for anyone who can do elementary math.”
• John Ketchum, President and CEO, NextEra Energy, said, “If we take renewables off the table, we are going to have a real power shortage problem… We’ll create our own reliability problem just by not having enough electrons to be able to satisfy all the demand we’re going to see. We’ll lose the AI race.”