President Donald Trump said that he would use his energy emergency declaration authority to approve power stations for AI data centers.
“We’re going to make it so that the plants will have their own electric generating facilities attached right to their plant," he said at the World Economic Forum this Thursday (Jan 23).
"They don’t have to worry about a utility.” He added that this would save years of waiting for approvals, due to environmental reviews, local consultation, and other factors.
“And the big problem is we need double the energy we currently have in the United States - can you imagine? - for AI to really be as big as we want to have it,” he continued.
“So, I’m going to give emergency declarations so that they can start building them almost immediately.”
The new president reiterated that the situation was an emergency, after declaring a broader energy emergency on his first day, and claimed that the powers meant "you can do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem."
His claim of doubling total US power consumption does not align with even the rosiest of data center predictions. After years of steady power consumption, data centers have begun to consume an increasing percentage of national power.
Department of Energy research estimates that data centers used 4.4 percent of the nation's power in 2023, but could increase to as much as 12 percent of US power by 2028.
Such estimates were made before Trump this week announced OpenAI would spearhead Stargate, a purported effort to pump $500bn into AI data centers over the next four years. OpenAI previously pitched $100bn, 5GW facilities, so this could represent 25GW of new consumption, which would push that percentage higher.
It would not, however, represent a doubling of total US power. The United States' electricity grid had a nameplate capacity of 1,280GW in 2023, according to US Energy Information Administration estimates.
To meet the growth forecast by the DOE, Stargate, or Trump, the president said that Saudi Arabia and other Opec nations should "bring down the cost of oil."
He said data centers could be powered by “anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup,” incorrectly pushing the concept of "clean coal."
He continued: "Nothing can destroy coal — not the weather, not a bomb, nothing."
