(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump and the governors of several US Northeastern states agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that would compel technology companies to effectively fund new power plants.

The unprecedented plan, set to be announced Friday morning, seeks to address growing tensions over how the nation can supply electricity to power-hungry data centers — seen as necessary to help win the global AI race — without simultaneously hiking utility bills for homes and businesses.

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The Trump administration and some US governors plan to direct grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC to hold an auction for tech companies to bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation capacity.

If the auction proceeds as envisaged, tech giants would pay for power over the duration of the contracts, whether they use the electricity or not, providing secure revenues for years in a market notorious for price volatility and generator bankruptcies.

The auction would deliver contracts supporting the construction of some $15 billion worth of new power plants, said a White House official granted anonymity to detail the approach.

Still, representatives of PJM won’t be in attendance when the plan is laid out Friday.

“We don’t have a lot to say on this,” PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields said by email. “We were not invited to the event they are apparently having tomorrow and we will not be there.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The push by the administration and the governors — which will come in the form of a non-binding “statement of principles” signed by Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and other states — responds to growing concern about power demand far outpacing supply in the region managed by PJM.

The grid operator serves more than 67 million people from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. PJM is already home to the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, in northern Virginia. It expects peak demand across its system to jump 17% by 2030 from this year’s high.

Trump has repeatedly described power plants being built alongside data centers, and on Monday, he doubled down on the idea, insisting in a social media post that the big technology companies that construct data centers must “pay their own way.”