Anyone who has owned a backup generator learns a hard lesson fast. Buying the machine is the easy part. Keeping it fed with fuel, week after week, is where the real cost hides.
President Donald Trump just asked America’s biggest data centers to learn that lesson at scale. He posted on Truth Social early Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026. He wrote that new and large data centers are “mandated by me to make their own electricity.”
He also told builders to give or sell any extra power back to the grid and pay host towns a “dividend,” Reuters reported. He pitched it as a way to hold down or even cut power bills for households.
Two companies are already living a version of this plan. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) makes power on site at several of its AI campuses. Bloom Energy Corp. (BE) supplies the fuel cells behind a big part of that effort.
To me, they are the clearest test of whether Trump’s idea works in practice. First, it helps to know why he keeps pushing it.
Also read: Oracle’s ‘force majeure’ warning lands as AI power gets scarce
Why Trump wants data centers to make their own power
The short answer is your power bill. Data centers have turned into a political flashpoint, and the anger now crosses party lines, Reuters noted. The post landed less than two weeks before the midterms, when no candidate wants to defend a higher bill.
Trump has pushed this idea since February. On Wednesday, March 4, 2026, Oracle and six other tech companies joined his Ratepayer Protection Pledge. They promised to build or buy new power and cover grid upgrades.
However, experts told The Associated Press the pledge is likely not enforceable at the federal level. Wednesday’s post dresses that voluntary promise in the language of a mandate.
The bigger question is what happens when a company actually does this. Oracle already has.
Oracle was already making its own power
Oracle’s problem was speed. AI customers wanted capacity now, and grid hookups can take years. So it turned to Bloom, whose fuel cells turn natural gas into electricity without burning it.
Bloom delivered a working system to Oracle in 55 days last year, according to a press release. A master agreement announced Monday, April 13, 2026, lets Oracle buy up to 2.8 gigawatts of Bloom fuel cells, the release said.
More Oracle:
- Oracle layoffs top 2,500 workers as AI spending surges
- Oracle’s ‘force majeure’ warning lands as AI power gets scarce
- Michael Burry just put a date on Big Tech’s AI reckoning, and Oracle’s $664 billion lands in crosshairs
Two weeks later, Oracle said Bloom would fully power Project Jupiter, its giant AI campus in New Mexico. Jupiter reads like an early draft of Trump’s post.
Oracle said it would bear all of Jupiter’s energy costs, and the project committed $360 million to schools, infrastructure and local services. That is the community dividend Trump described, promised months before he asked.
What Oracle could not promise was steady fuel.
Making your own power costs more than it looks
Fuel cells still need fuel. Jupiter’s gas was meant to arrive through a new pipeline called Green Chile, but its start slipped to Monday, February 1, 2027, Bloomberg reported.
So Oracle turned to trucks, hauling compressed gas to Utah and Texas sites while pipelines get built, a separate Bloomberg report found. It is weighing the same fix for Jupiter. East Daley Analytics told Bloomberg that trucked gas costs about four times the price of gas at a major pipeline hub.
Oracle can hardly afford that premium. Its free cash flow was negative $28.7 billion over the past 12 months, according to StockAnalysis. It even invoked force majeure, a contract clause for events beyond its control, to limit its costs if Jupiter runs late.
Here is what I find most telling: Trump’s plan moves the power bill away from households without shrinking it. Shareholders pick it up instead, and the two stocks show who is paying.
Oracle stock carries the bill as Bloom gets paid
Oracle shares have fallen about 53% over the past 52 weeks, according to StockAnalysis. That slide reflects worry about cash, not a shortage of customers.
Even so, the 43 analysts tracked by StockAnalysis rate Oracle a Buy on average, with a mean target near $237. That reads like a bet that the power problems are temporary.
Bloom sits on the other side of the trade. Its shares have more than doubled over the same 52 weeks, according to StockAnalysis, as builders pay up for fast power.
Yet its showcase Oracle project waits on the same delayed pipeline. Bloom reports third quarter results on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, and any update on New Mexico could matter more than the headline numbers.
Trump’s plan now runs through a pipeline
Trump’s post pictures data centers with power to spare, selling the surplus back to town. A campus running on trucked gas has no surplus to sell. That gap between the promise and the plumbing is the real story.
The next big decision belongs to the regulators weighing the Green Chile pipeline, not the White House. Their answer will tell every builder what Trump’s model truly costs.
The AI race once turned into a race over who could buy the most chips. Increasingly, it turns on who can get fuel to the front gate.
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