In brief remarks to reporters at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said he was shocked to learn how much energy is needed to develop artificial intelligence and said his administration is currently approving plans for an energy facility to power data centers “within weeks.”
After first explaining investment accounts for children, Trump answered a question about cryptocurrencies and said he was told by Big Tech leaders who are rushing to develop artificial intelligence that they needed access to double the country’s existing energy capacity in order to advance their technology and beat foreign competitors.
President Trump also said that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin told him that tech companies were not taking advantage of the administration’s promise to quickly approve private power plants that support AI development.
President Trump said he then called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to ask why they had not submitted plans for the power plant in parallel with the data center development.
“They thought we were kidding,” Trump said Monday. “They can’t believe it’s going to be approved in a matter of weeks.”
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how the administration would approve the power plant plan in the coming weeks.
The government is moving to waive environmental protections, expedite permitting and ease construction rules for gas plants and data centers, but there are numerous state and local requirements that both power plants and data centers must meet, and permitting can take months even in the earliest environments.
President Trump said his idea was to allow tech companies to power their data by building their own “behind-the-meter” generation units on-site, but the mainstream practice is to allow companies to always have access to power. Dedicated power plants for data centers are only becoming more popular as companies race to bring their facilities online.
The president said tech companies can use any type of energy, specifically nuclear, oil and gas, excluding wind. President Trump said, “I will not tolerate the wind.” “The wind is so bad, there’s nothing we can do.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, President Trump is seeking to phase out wind energy, which generates one-tenth of the electricity generated in the United States.
The race to develop AI, which requires data centers to handle energy-intensive computing, has led to plans to build or expand 74 methane gas plants across the United States, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a national nonprofit founded more than 20 years ago by the former director of EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement.
The gas-fired power plants, proposed exclusively for data centers, are expected to generate 143 gigawatts of electricity, nearly three times as much as California, the report said.
Of these 74 gas plants, 32 are in Texas, 10 in Ohio, and seven in Pennsylvania.
The report said power plants would emit about 662 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution a year, equivalent to Australia’s emissions. This wave of power plants for data centers can also emit air pollutants that cause smog and lung damage.
“The industries of the future should not be tied to the dirty fuels of the past,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Conservation Project, said in a statement.
“While data centers may be needed to keep pace with technological change, the public has a right to transparency and accountability, clean air, and common sense controls to protect our water supplies, especially in regions already suffering from water scarcity,” Duggan said. Data centers often use large amounts of water to cool servers.
The facility quickly became very unpopular in communities across the country, as the data center industry sought to deploy supercomputer warehouses and associated fossil fuel power plants and generators in rural America.
Some lawmakers have long been vocal about their concerns about data center construction. In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) introduced a bill proposing a moratorium on all new data center construction until AI safeguards are in place, including protections for workers and the environment.
As midterm elections approach, some politicians are responding to an outcry from voters and distancing themselves from the industry.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for a block on new data center development in rural areas of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas last week. This is a step further than recent demands aimed at limiting the impact on residential communities by requiring data centers to pay their own infrastructure costs, reuse water and add new generation to the state’s independent power grid.
The New York State Legislature passed a bill in June that would suspend data center permits for one year. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, New York will become the first state in the U.S. to restrict data centers in this way. However, Hochul, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, said he believes the matter should be left to local governments.
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Monterey Park, California, and Asheville, Ohio are among the U.S. communities that have passed temporary bans or moratoriums on new data centers.
The Trump administration announced last month that it would not set national environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry.
EPA Administrator Zeldin said at the Politico Energy Summit in June that there are technologies and practices to reduce air pollution and water use, but states and local communities know what’s best for them.
Clara Vondrich, senior policy advisor for Public Citizen’s Climate Program, said that by not enforcing federal regulations, the EPA has given Big Tech companies the green light to build polluting power plants and water-guzzling facilities without enforcing any environmental protections.
“Big tech executives have lobbied hard to get into the Trump administration’s orbit,” Bondrich said. “Mr. Zeldin made it clear that their investment was well spent.”
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Arcelia Martin is an award-winning journalist with Inside Climate News. She is based in Dallas and covers renewable energy in Texas. Prior to joining ICN in 2025, Arceria served as a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News and The Tennessean. She is a native of San Diego, California and a graduate of Gonzaga University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
