Trump, Lamont find unlikely common ground on data center power demands

Hartford Business Journal – Wednesday, February 25, 2026
By Andrew Larson

President Donald Trump and Gov. Ned Lamont don’t agree on much. But when it comes to who should foot the bill for powering artificial intelligence data centers, the two politicians from opposing parties are singing the same tune.

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Trump announced what he called a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” telling Congress and the country that his administration is requiring major technology companies to generate their own electricity rather than drawing from the public grid.

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up.”

The remarks landed just three weeks after Lamont staked out a nearly identical position in his own Feb. 4 State of the State address, declaring that Connecticut would “slow down new data centers, unless they add more generation as well.”

The convergence of views reflects a national reckoning over who bears the costs of the AI computing boom — and how electric grids built for a different era can accommodate an explosive surge in demand. The question is no longer whether data centers strain the grid, but how governments respond.

For Connecticut, where commercial electricity rates run roughly 21 to 23 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to a national average of about 13 cents, the stakes are particularly high. The state already ranks third in the nation for electricity costs, and officials have been wary of policies that could push rates even higher by requiring grid upgrades to accommodate power-hungry facilities.

Neither Trump nor Lamont has produced a formal policy on data centers. Lamont’s office acknowledged shortly after his address that the concept was “very premature.”

The legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee is setting the stage to retool the state’s data center policy. It has introduced a bill, SB 245, that would effectively sunset the state’s existing data center tax incentive program by barring the Department of Economic and Community Development from accepting new applications starting July 1, 2026.

The incentive program, created by the legislature in 2021, offers sales, use and property tax exemptions of up to 30 years for qualifying data center investments. Despite its existence for nearly five years, it has attracted only a single application: Bloomfield-based insurer The Cigna Group, for a roughly $380 million upgrade to its Windsor data center.

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