"Claim That Electricity Bills Will Rise Is a Lie": US Secretary Urges More AI Data Centers

Chris Wright, US Secretary of Energy who leads the Donald Trump administration's flagship artificial intelligence (AI) initiative "Genesis Mission," urged AI entrepreneurs to devote themselves to expanding data centers. His argument is that the notion of AI causing electricity price hikes is not only absurd, but that increased AI demand will boost power supply and instead lower electricity bills.

Secretary Wright held a dialogue with Dave Levy, Vice President of AWS Global Public Sector, during a keynote address at "AWS Summit 2026," held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Monday. The Department of Energy is the key agency overseeing the Genesis Mission, which President Trump signed into an executive order last year.

The Genesis Mission is a national project mobilizing all capabilities to win the AI hegemony competition with China. It is called the "AI-version Manhattan Project," drawing a comparison to the Manhattan Project that developed nuclear weapons in the past. Its goal is to build a new AI platform, the "American Science and Security Platform" (ASSP), by integrating resources such as science databases managed by the federal government and supercomputers at 17 national laboratories under the US Department of Energy. In September, President Trump also signed an executive order to develop treatments for pediatric cancer using AI.

Secretary Wright, the head of the Genesis Mission, spent time dismissing AI skepticism before the AI business leaders and researchers gathered at the venue. "To put simply what we can achieve with AI, today cancer is virtually a death sentence," he said. "You have only months or years to live, but we can know its exact cause. We will decode the genome and develop treatments, making it a manageable disease. We will save hundreds of thousands, millions of lives, and there is nothing more exciting than this." His remarks drew applause at the venue.

Secretary Wright stressed, "AlphaFold was one of the early use cases of AI, and now it is far more advanced than that. Imagine understanding how biology works at the molecular level, how diseases arise, and how treatments work." Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, co-developed the protein structure prediction AI "AlphaFold" and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In particular, Secretary Wright refuted the AI-driven electricity price hikes claimed by AI opponents as flawed logic. He argued that recent electricity price increases are due to the previous administration's misguided energy policy. "Historically, the goal of the power grid was to supply cheap and safe electricity, and for 100 years we have improved the grid's reliability and lowered inflation-adjusted electricity costs," he explained. "We lost our way, but now we are finding our way again."

Secretary Wright's argument is that the recent electricity price increase stemmed from an oversupply of power—to the point of generating "negative supply prices"—that resulted from the Democratic administration's focus on renewable energy policy. His logic is that wind and solar power cannot adjust supply according to power demand due to environmental factors, so oversupply frequently occurs and distorts the demand-and-supply structure. He argued that supply went unregulated as subsidies were even provided to renewable energy development companies, and that authorities took the reckless step of raising electricity bills to strike a balance. "While providing subsidies for wind and solar, we shut down three nuclear power plants. Why were three nuclear power plants shut down?" he pointed out. "It was because the power market was so distorted that bidding prices frequently turned negative when there was surplus capacity during the daytime."

Secretary Wright said, "I disagree with the idea that data centers will raise electricity bills," stating that if data centers proliferate, power demand will increase and the distorted structure will be corrected. His argument is that when hyperscalers (large-scale computing infrastructure operators) build data centers, long-term contracts of three to five years are signed in each region, and power supply will also increase in consideration of rising demand. "Regions like California and New York, where electricity bills are expensive and rising rapidly, produce less electricity than five years ago," he stressed. "Increasing demand is a way to stop price increases and ultimately lower prices."

Secretary Wright strongly criticized AI opposition, likening it to the "fracking debate." "People who oppose AI also oppose data centers. This is the same movement as the anti-fracking campaign I fought against 15 years ago," he said. "The arguments are the same too. They say it uses too much water, pollutes water, is bad for the environment, and will raise electricity bills." The anti-fracking campaign is a political slogan opposing the production of energy by extracting natural gas from shale rock formations. "There will be no more valuable use of water than the water used in data centers. Water consumption is very small and the benefits are very large. There are claims that it takes away jobs and harms local communities, but I don't want to exaggerate," he stressed. "Just as we did in the fracking debate, we will win this debate too."