Biden’s Lasting Legacy Is Making the World a More Dangerous Place

The more meaningful development is that the administration is reportedly working on an executive order to roll out the red carpet for power-hungry data centers. Sources familiar with the plan recently told The Washington Post that the order could open up federal lands for building AI data centers “that consume at least one gigawatt of electricity,” roughly as much as a city of one million residents. The order may relax environmental restrictions and allow companies to build power plants “fueled by natural gas at the same sites, with wind or solar power expected to eventually take the place of natural gas.”

The rush to subsidize AI has been inspired in large part by the pitch—made mostly by tech companies—that the U.S. faces some grave national security threat if it doesn’t give these tech companies everything they want, now. “China, fixated on seizing the lead by 2030, is building faster—harnessing government-controlled data and increasing its production of chips and energy,” OpenAI warned in a white paper presented to administration officials this fall. “Energy above all is critical to the U.S. maintaining its lead.”

Conveniently for tech magnates, that crisis narrative has overshadowed questions about what all this new AI will do, whether it’s necessary, and what the market for it actually is. The rush to build new AI infrastructure and power it risks bringing a fleet of unnecessary new fossil-fueled power plants online, which could then lock in higher emissions for decades to come. This last-ditch AI frenzy could also hand the Trump administration even more tools by which to further enrich the companies and executives—including Open AI’s Sam Altman, Meta, and Amazon—that are cozying up to him.