The White House is preparing a package of executive orders to help lower the barriers to entry for people who are involved in energy production for artificial intelligence in the United States, four sources said.
The top two rival economies, U.S. and China, are engaged in a technological cold war – and through it they gain an upper hand both economically and militarily.” The massive data processing demands of AI will soon be served only by fast-growing supplies of new power, straining utilities and grids in a number of states.
Options being studied include streamlining the process for establishing new power-generating projects to join the grid and offering federal land for construction of the servers and data centers that will be required to operate AI technology, the sources said.
The administration will also unveil an AI action plan, and it will hold public events to raise public awareness of the efforts, the people said on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
And the White House did not return requests for comment.
It takes a massive amount of electricity to train large-scale A.I. models, and the industry’s booming growth has finally prompted the first big increase in U.S. power consumption in a decade.
From 2024 to 2029, U.S. electricity demand will grow at five times the pace forecast in 2022, power-sector consultancy Grid Strategies projects.
Meanwhile, power demand from AI data centers could increase by more than thirtyfold by 2035, a recent report from consultancy Deloitte found.
But building and hooking up new power generation to the grid has been a major impediment, with such projects dependent on highly detailed impact studies that can take years to conduct, and overwhelmed existing transmission infrastructure.
It has also been difficult to site data centers, because larger facilities need a lot of space and resources and may run into issues with zoning or local opposition.
The executive orders could fix that by opening up land managed by the Defense Department or the Interior Department to developers of projects, the sources said.
The administration is also exploring simplifying the permitting for data centers and creating a nationwide Clean Water Act permit, rather than requiring companies to get permits on a state-by-state basis, one of the sources said.
Trump held a meeting in January with some of the nation’s top tech CEOs to promote the Stargate Project, a multibillion-dollar initiative aimed at developing data centers and more than 100,000 jobs in the United States led by the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, and also involving SoftBank and Oracle.
Trump has made it his paramount responsibility to be the winner of the AI race versus China, and he even announced on his first day in office a national energy emergency with a plan to bypass any and all regulations to fast-track oil and gas drilling, coal and critical mineral mining, and the construction of new gas and nuclear power plants to get more energy production online.
And in January, he directed his administration to deliver an AI Action Plan to make “America the world capital in artificial intelligence” and cut regulatory barriers to its rapid expansion.
That assessment, which will have input from the National Security Council, is due by July 23. The White House is also weighing calling July 23 “AI Action Day” to bring attention to the report and show its commitment to growing the industry, two of the sources said.
On July 15, Trump is due to deliver remarks at an AI and energy event in Pennsylvania for Sen. Dave McCormick.
Earlier this month,Amazon said it would invest $20 billion to build data centers in two Pennsylvania countries.
