The White House has requested formal pledges from US tech giants that the swelling data centre boom will not drive up electricity bills for households, as concern mounts over AI’s energy demands. Donald Trump has approached behemoths like Microsoft and Alphabet, who have notoriously rallied behind his administration, about signing voluntary, non-binding agreements committing them to “pay their own way” as they build out new infrastructure. Most notably, the proposal requests that hyper-scale data centre operators cover 100 per…