> Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?

That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do.

It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway.

Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they were probably going to do regardless, because colocating large data centers with power plants saves the expense of power transmission which lowers their costs.

And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase. They temporarily cause demand to exceed supply until supply has time to catch up. So on the one hand the whole issue is kind of meh because it was only ever going to be a temporary price increase anyway, and on the other hand having them build power plants at the same rate anybody else is building power plants doesn't actually change anything or address the temporary shortfall. (If you really want to solve it, find a way to build power generation capacity faster.)

And then it doesn't matter if you can enforce the promise because they're just promising to do things they were going to do anyway.