President Donald Trump said he plans to give developers "very rapid approvals" to build data centers running artificial intelligence (AI) software, as well as off-grid electric generating facilities to power them.
"I'm going to give emergency declarations so they can start building them almost immediately," Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in virtual remarks on Thursday. Allowing for a rapid increase in power generation capacity will enable the US to scale up its AI capabilities and be competitive with China, he said.
Trump said he has been telling developers that he wants them to build electric generating facilities next to their planned data centers. These would bypass connection to the grid, which he said is "old" and unreliable. The developers will be able to fuel their generators with "anything they want," including natural gas, and could use "good, clean coal" as a back-up in case a gas pipeline were to explode, cutting gas supplies to a data center's off-grid gas power plant, he said.
Trump's comments echo those made recently by executives in the oil and gas industry, who are betting that tech giants' desire to quickly build out data centers to develop their own AI software will force them to eschew the long, arduous interconnection process through which new customers connect to the grid, and instead secure their own personal supply of electricity generated by natural gas.
ExxonMobil in December said it was in talks to provide AI data centers with "fully islanded" gas-fired power, which could be installed "independent of utility timelines" and at a pace that other baseload generation fuel sources, like nuclear, could not match.
Alan Armstrong, chief executive of Williams, the largest US gas pipeline company, told Argus that AI data center operators are going to build in states where they can quickly secure off-grid electricity supplies.
