JUNE 17, 2026 |This week in the newsletter: The energy implications of a federal stake in AI companies, questions over PJM’s effectiveness, and registration for Flex Summit 2026 is now open.
NICK ZENKIN| On June 5, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had beentalking with AI executives about the government taking a stake in their companies. The concept he floated was a voluntary and passive stake, similar to the administration'srecent decision to take a 9.9% position in Intel.
Days earlier, Senator Bernie Sandersintroduced a bill that would take the same instinct much further: a one-time 50% tax, paid in stock, on the largest AI firms, with shares seeding a sovereign wealth fund and the government holding voting rights and a board seat at each company.
The convergence is worth pausing on. Sanders arriving here is no surprise, as redistributing the gains of concentrated private capital is the throughline of his entire career. That a Republican president is floating the same idea, however voluntarily and however passively, reflects something real about the political moment. AI wealth concentration has become legible as a problem across the ideological spectrum in a way that very few economic issues are.
The mechanism each proposed also reveals everything about what they actually want: Trump's version keeps the government as a passive beneficiary, Sanders' version puts it in the boardroom. But the starting premise, that the public should have a claim on this technology, is shared.
Both proposals have been debated almost entirely as questions of wealth distribution and whether ordinary Americans should share in the gains of a technology built on collective knowledge. This is a real argument, and one worth having. But it leaves out what owning these companies would actually entail.
The companies in question own no power plants and no transmission lines. Their value is a bet on data center demand, and that demand runs entirely through a grid that the federal government regulates. Owning a piece of OpenAI or Anthropic is not the same as owning a neutral financial asset. It is taking a position in how fast the grid gets developed and how cheaply the power gets delivered, because that is what the companies valuations are priced on. The wealth debate is an energy policy question wearing a distribution policy costume.
The two proposals differ in how directly the government acts on that interest.
The Trump version is passive, which limits the interference but also limits the reach. It gives the government a financial reason to want fast, cheap power but no hand to make it happen. It also means a company can simply decline, and Anthropic has already done exactly that. The company confirmed it is not in talks with the administration about providing equity. The voluntary path has a hole in it, one roughly the size of the second-most-valuable AI lab in the world.
The Sanders bill closes that hole but opens a larger one. Board representation at a company whose biggest operating constraint is power procurement would put the government in the room when decisions get made about where to site data centers and how to contract for power.
The conflict here is that the same government regulates the grid that those decisions run through. It would be sitting on both sides, shaping the companies' demand for power and setting the rules for the grid that has to meet it. And that conflict scales with Sanders' goal. The stronger the guarantee that the public benefits, the more involved the government has to be to deliver it, and the more of the national energy buildout it has taken onto its own books.
Washington is already expanding its authority over the exact bottleneck that decides how fast these companies grow. FERC hascommitted to act on large load interconnection rules by the end of this month. The two questions it's deciding — how fast large loads can connect, and who pays for the grid upgrades they require — are precisely the questions a financially interested government would have a reason to want answered a certain way.
MAEVE ALLSUP |It’s been nearly a year since capacity market prices in the mid-Atlantic spiked, reaching the price cap and putting the region at the center of a national debate over whether energy markets are prepared for the AI era.
Grid operator PJM is juggling a veritable storm of change this summer, driven by demand that the RTO itself acknowledges requires a much faster response than its current frameworks allow for. PJM expects peak summer electricity demand to increase by 3.6% annually over the next decade, fueled in part by the massive growth in data center interconnection requests.
In response, PJM is reworking the generation interconnection queue, undergoing a stakeholder process to get large loads online more quickly, grappling with the question of whether data centers can be relied on for load flexibility, and scrambling to organize an “emergency backstop procurement”, designed to facilitate bilateral deals between new generation and power hungry data centers.
But simmering in the background, fueled by a comment from Trump-appointed FERC chair Laura Swett, is a more foundational question: Is the region just too big to be effective?
Latitude Media |The Trump administration stepped in a federal court case with significant implications for how AI data centers use behind-the-meter generation.
*Bloomberg | Crusoe is being pushed off a Wyoming AI campus after failing to lock in Google as a customer.
Latitude Media | At long last, Amazon has reported how much water its global data centers use: 2.5 billion gallons in 2025.
Google | Google is investing $1.5 billion for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. According to Google’s head of advanced energy, Michael Terrell, the campus has become "a proving ground for how data center growth can catalyze the transition to 24/7 clean, affordable electricity.”
*The New York Times| In Alabama, the G.O.P. candidate for a slot on the Alabama Public Service Commission is blaming both data centers and solar power for rising electricity costs.
Politico | California Governor Gavin Newsom is opting out of the national fight against AI data centers, in a major political gamble.
Axios | Sen. Elizabeth Warren is asking for more information on large infrastructure investors’ data center deals, and possible overlaps with utilities ownership.
NBC News | Republican senator Cynthia Lummis’ POWER Up Act would give FERC authority to approve or reject data centers’ connections to some grids.
Politico| EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the Trump administration is not going to set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry.
Morningstar| “After a two-year rally backed by data center buildouts, utilities stocks have tumbled 7% since their February peak.”
*Bloomberg | The UK’s energy regulator is weighing whether future data centers should be required to reduce power consumption during periods of system stress.
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Recommended Podcast
Open Circuit | New polling shows voters are furious about electricity prices, data centers, and utility profits. Will this be the push utilities need to finally change the way utilities pay for infrastructure?
Events and Resources
Flex Summit 2026 is Latitude Media’s two-day conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the new demand economy, taking shape as AI data center load growth and electrification have the electricity system at an inflection point. It will take place on October 14-15, 2026, in Austin, Texas. Register here.
Aurora Energy Research is hosting a webinar on data center growth, coal retirements, and price implications in MISO on June 22, 2026.
In this episode of The Circuit, by Bloomberg Originals, journalist Emily Chang meets Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei.
This Berkeley Lab report identifies solutions for accelerating large load connections.
