The truth is Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI and all the other major tech firms behind the AI data center boom are more than happy to shell out for more electricity generation. And they have been.  

“They have no shortage of money,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana of the tech giants powering the global artificial intelligence race. “They really don’t have a problem with funding this thing.” Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars on capital investments annually, far exceeding the budgets of the entire utility segment.

Data center developers have in fact already said they’d like to buy electricity off the nation’s power grids as opposed to signing contracts directly with power generators. That’s because grid rates can be cheaper, grids are equipped with backup resources and such systems can help stabilize supplies during extreme weather events. Hyperscalers have also been signing contracts to help bring back nuclear or build new nuclear.

Either way, the reality is tech companies have been trying to secure power from every source they can find — both on and off the grids — with data center power demand set to triple by 2035. 

Read More: AI Data Center Energy Needs Are Straining Global Power Systems

“We agree data centers should pay their own way,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg. “For us, it is table stakes. When built responsibly, data centers can provide long-term, reliable demand that stimulates new investments in energy production and transmission in a way that helps all consumers.”

In calling for an auction, Trump may be solving a public relations problem for tech companies, according to analysts. The industry and their power suppliers have drawn criticism over rising electricity bills and the potential environmental impacts of new plants. An auction like the one Trump’s proposing would allow them to circumvent the political headwinds facing individual projects. 

“This could be a more expeditious way to simply address the issue, as opposed to dealing with all this resistance and problems that are associated with it,” said Paul Patterson, a utility analyst at Glenrock Associates LLC. 

Under Trump’s plan, grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC will hold an auction for tech companies to bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation capacity. Such contracts are exactly what data center developers are after, offering “more stability, more certainty and more predictability about what the price is going to be,” Patterson said. 

The student-debt relief will likely come as relief to many members of Gen Z, who, as Fortune‘s Jacqueline Munis recently reported, average $94,000 in student-loan debt, driving them into “disillusionomics.” Other pundits, notably Kyla Scanlon, have riffed on the concept of “financial nihilism,” as coined by entrepreneur Demetri Kofinas, to describe how Gen Z’s crushing anxiety over their own futures—be it artificial intelligence, the $38 trillion national debt, or any other long-running financial emergency—drive them to destructive behaviors.

Trump, for his part, has been scrambling to address voter concerns about “affordability,” and has been reportedly in close contact, even texting back and forth in what the New York Post calls a “bromance,” with the bard of affordability himself: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In the opinion of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, though, the nonpartisan watchdog that stresses sustainability in fiscal policy, there is no excuse for this development.

CRFB President Maya MacGuineas called the decision “beyond ridiculous,” coming six years removed from the Covid pandemic that first put a stop to student-debt collections.

“This is an incoherent political giveaway, doubling down on the debt cancelation from the Biden era,” she wrote. “We’re not in a pandemic or financial crisis or deep recession. There’s no justification for emergency action on student debt, and no good reason the for the President to back down on efforts to actually begin collecting debt payments again.”

CRFB estimated that Trump’s pivot away from collections would cost about $5 billion a year in lost revenue.

The action came just days after Trump took another page out of Mamdani’s democratic socialist playbook, suggesting a 10% cap on credit card interest rates. His former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, suggested that this “hard-left” move could only have come from one place: his text message bromance with the princeling of Gotham.

OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo said in a blog post that ads will begin appearing at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers for free users and for Go subscribers (who pay $8 a month) in the U.S. in the coming weeks, opening an important new source of revenue for the high-flying startup which has been valued by investors at $500 billion.

It’s a moment many in tech have long viewed as inevitable: Running frontier AI models is brutally expensive, burning through staggering amounts of computing power, electricity, and GPUs. Advertising’s revenue stream is hard to resist. OpenAI expects to generate “low billions” of dollars in revenue this year, and more each year thereafter, the FT reported on Friday citing an unnamed person “close to the company.”

While Google has so far held back from putting ads in its standalone Gemini chatbot app, the company has incorporated ads into the AI Overviews that appear in its online search results, a move viewed as essential as the company seeks to extend its $265 billion a year advertising business into the AI age.

OpenAI said in its blog post that the forthcoming ads will be clearly labeled, and that users’ conversations with ChatGPT would be kept private. “You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers,” the company said. “We need to keep a high bar and give you control over your experience so you see truly relevant, high-quality ads—and can turn off personalization if you want.” In addition, it said that ads will not influence ChatGPT’s answers, which it said “are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you.”

OpenAI emphasized that subscriptions remain its long-term priority, and said that the $20 per month Plus and $200 per month Pro subscriptions, as well as the Business Enterprise version of the product, will remain ad-free. “Our enterprise and subscription businesses are already strong, and we believe in having a diverse revenue model where ads can play a part in making intelligence more accessible to everyone,” the company wrote.

Still, the company doubled down on tying the introduction of ads with its overall mission to ensure that advanced general intelligence, or AGI, “benefits all of humanity,” Simo wrote.

In a separate blog post on Friday, OpenAI said that “ads support our commitment to making AI accessible to everyone by helping us keep ChatGPT available at free and affordable price points.”