Climate Activists Protest Data Centre Rush in the US as Trump Considers Clamping Down on State AI Laws
At a time when enterprises have cause for concern around higher software bills for using AI-powered tools and solutions, there is a growing movement in the United States seeking a moratorium on construction of new data centres. Reports suggest that energy costs this year are already up 13%, larger than any annual increase in the past decade.
Organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are among 230 plus entities that signed a public memorandum urging Congress to support such a national moratorium, given the sharp rise in electricity and water construction by data centres.
The memorandum, is available as a letter written by the signatories to members of the US Congress, says “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centres to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security.”
Reports published by NPR.org and CNBC have linked growing energy prices to the launch of new data centres in specific regions with independent surveys conducted claiming that 80% of consumers too were concerned about their growing utility bills. Key states facing the crunch include Virginia, Ohio, Illinois and New Jersey.
Rising power utilities cost and growing data centres
The CNBC report quoted the US Energy Information Administration to suggest that residential power bills rose an average 6% across the US in August. Though reasons are complex and vary by region, three states with highest number of data centres saw utility bills rise faster than the national average, with Illinois facing the highest spike at 16%.
Various studies in the past have come up with data to suggest that energy demand for these data centres would triple over the next ten years, up from around 40 gigawatts now to about 106 gigawatts by 2035. What’s more, a large chunk of this growth would be coming up in rural areas where residents have already complained of health issues.
Which is why we had warned in an earlier article published in November that policy planners in India may want to look at alternative approaches to power up the growth of data centres in the country. In fact, things got uglyoutside a DTE utility centre in Detroit over demands for more power supply for Oracle and OpenAI data centres.
Trump has taken notice and an executive order is underway
These demonstrations happened last week and President Donald Trump appears to have taken note of it quickly enough. He notified the world through a post on Truth Social that an executive order from the White House would follow this week that would limit states from enacting their own regulation of AI technology.
Since energy bills and data centre approvals are regulated by individual States, one could say that Trump is playing by the rules set by AI czars like Greg Brockman of OpenAI and David Sacks, who is considered the AI chief at the White House. These guys had argued that laws by states around AI would stifle innovation and cause China to overtake US.
In his post, Trump said, “You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI. We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS…AI WILL BE DESTROYED IN ITS INFANCY!”
Support is bipartisan which is why Trump has no choice
The step comes barely days after another effort to pre-empt states from regulating AI was quashed by the US Senate after Congress failed to insert this proposal into a defence bill. California already has a new law under Bill SB 53 that seeks safety and transparency while Tennessee has the ELVIS Act that protects creators from AI copyright infringements.
Trump already had a draft law in place that got leaked some weeks ago and indicated the creation of an AI Litigation Task Force that would only challenge state AI laws in court. Such an order is likely to give Sacks direct authority over federal AI policy, which ironically would see the White House Office of Science and Technology being superseded.
Trump’s decision to act may have also been influenced by the decision of a bipartisan coalition of 35 state attorneys general that warned Congress last month over overriding AI state laws. They called out the “disastrous consequences” of such a move that led to 200 state legislators signing an open letter against federal pre-emption.