The Trump administration released a new “action plan” for AI that does little to solve the industry’s looming power crisis.
The plan recommends a number of rollbacks to environmental oversight to speed up the permitting process for new energy infrastructure, and proposes the federal government “embrace new energy generation sources at the technological frontier.” But there’s little here the administration hasn’t said before; the plan “introduces no new policy recommendations that de-bottleneck key near-term power infrastructure constraints impeding data center development,” John Miller, energy transition policy analyst at the investment bank TD Cowen, wrote in a note. That’s partly because many of those constraints come down to state and local policy, over which the federal government has little control, Miller said.
But in a move that seemed to run counter to its AI objectives, the White House on Wednesday yanked nearly $5 billion in funding for one of the US’ biggest transmission grid projects (the project will proceed with private finance, the company behind it said). The scale of the AI-energy challenge was made clear on Tuesday, when the country’s biggest grid network said its energy costs — ultimately passed on to consumers — soared 22% from last year.
