Trump AI plan would “ramp up exploitation” of people and the environment, advocates warn
The “AI action plan,” released July 23 by the White House,
calls for the development of new AI data centers – huge facilities that house
AI computing infrastructure – to be waived from typical assessment
requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, which determine a
project’s environmental impact.
The plan also proposes expediting environmental permitting
for such data centers by streamlining or reducing regulations under the Clean
Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws, and calls on
agencies to make federal lands available for constructing data centers and
their power generation infrastructure.
In accordance with the Trump Administration’s AI plan, the
US Department of Energy today announced four sites across the country selected
to invite private sector partners to develop AI data centers and energy
generation projects – a “bold step” that will “accelerate the next Manhattan
Project,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a statement.
The plan is “nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” Mitch Jones, the managing director of policy and litigation for the nonprofit Food & Water Watch, said in a statement. “The expanding data center industry is being leveraged as an excuse to prolong the life of filthy, climate-killing fossil fuel power and dangerous nuclear plants, and even build new ones.”
The document states that the US is locked in a “race to
achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI)” and that “Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and
reap broad economic and military benefits. America’s environmental permitting
system and other regulations make it almost impossible to build this
infrastructure in the United States with the speed that is required.”
Doug Kelly, CEO of the Meta (formerly Facebook)-funded tech advocacy group the American Edge Project, said in a statement that the plan is “a giant leap forward in
the race to secure American leadership in artificial intelligence.”
Donald Trump on July 23 also signed three
executive orders related to AI development, speeding up federal permitting of data center projects as
outlined in the plan, establishing an AI exports program and preventing “woke AI” in the federal government.
Eating up energy
AI technology is more energy-intensive than many users may
realize, with a typical search using OpenAI’s ChatGPT using almost 10 times more electricity than a Google search
and ChatGPT’s daily electricity usage equaling that of 180,000 US households in 2024, according to Food &
Water Watch. Each day, one Meta data center uses as much power as 7 million
laptops running for a full workday, according to the group’s site.
There are currently more than 1,000 so-called “hyperscale” data centers
worldwide, with over half of these massive facilities located in the US.
A recent report by the group suggests the AI’s industry’s
impacts on water and energy resources could skyrocket in coming years, finding
that by 2028 the energy demand from AI servers and data centers in the US could
increase threefold. By that year, a million Olympic swimming pools of water may
be needed to cool AI servers each year and the industry may require enough
electricity to power more than 28 million American homes.
“Across the South we are seeing states and communities
clamor for more information about the infrastructure demands for AI, not less,”
Alys Campaigne, the climate initiative leader for the Southern Environmental
Law Center (SELC), said in a statement responding to Trump’s AI action plan.
Creating an exclusion from NEPA would make it harder for
impacted communities to get information about the environmental or public
health impacts of new data centers, and the plan fails to mention the need to
consult with communities beforehand, says the SELC press release.
Treated “like obstacles”
Training one AI model can produce as much air pollution as
more than 10,000 car trips from Los Angeles to New York City, according to
a study published
on a preprint server in December 2024. The resulting public health burden of
data centers may amount to over $20 billion per year in 2030 – double the
health burden of coal-based steel production, the authors concluded, with an
estimated 600,000 people suffering asthma symptoms and about 1,300 premature
deaths resulting from the pollution.
Some US communities are already suffering alleged injustices
from AI data centers. In a predominately Black community in Memphis, a
supercomputer facility owned by xAI, a company founded by tech billionaire Elon
Musk, has reportedly increased area smog by 30-60% as it releases toxic pollutants. Dozens of
methane gas turbines owned by xAI are unpermitted, according to SELC.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in June sent the company a letter threatening to sue if it continues using unpermitted
gas turbines at its data center.
“All too often, big corporations like xAI treat our
communities and families like obstacles to be pushed aside,” NAACP President
and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “We cannot afford to normalize
this kind of environmental injustice.”
