White House Launches AI Data Center Task Force with Industry Experts

(Bloomberg) -- OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and Nvidia Corporation CEO Jensen Huang met with senior Biden administration officials and other industry leaders at the White House, where they discussed steps to address massive infrastructure needs for artificial intelligence projects.

On the tech side, attendees also included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google President Ruth Porat, Amazon’s cloud chief Matt Garman, and Microsoft Corporation President Brad Smith, according to a White House statement on Thursday’s meeting (September 12).

Government officials included Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Following the talks, the White House announced an interagency task force to help promote data center development in the US and initiatives to support accelerated permitting for those facilities.

The steps are aimed at ensuring that the US retains its leadership in the field of AI, where rapid advances by industry require significant investments in data centers and energy supply. 

The Energy Department will also steer data center owners and operators toward resources such as loans, grants, and tax credits that can help them find clean and reliable power sources, according to the White House statement. Attendees from the energy industry included Exeleon CEO Calvin Butler.

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OpenAI, for example, plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on a domestic AI infrastructure push that spans data centers, energy capacity, and transmission and semiconductor manufacturing – with investment from around the globe.

Company executives have been meeting with government officials for months about a range of issues related to the initiative, including national security concerns that could be associated with foreign capital.

The discussions took place the same day that OpenAI announced a new artificial intelligence model known internally as “Strawberry” that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, a step that signaled the intensity of the competition.     

“OpenAI believes infrastructure is destiny and that building additional infrastructure in the US is critical to the country’s industrial policy and economic future,” OpenAI said in a statement Thursday. The company highlighted the economic benefits of investing in US data center projects, including a possible 40,000 jobs across a number of states. OpenAI pointed to similar investments by China, which aims to be a global AI leader by the end of the decade. 

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Porat called robust US energy infrastructure crucial to ensuring US leadership in the emerging field of AI. “Today’s White House convening was an important opportunity to advance the work required to modernize and expand the capacity of America’s energy grid,” she said in a statement.

Anthropic and Microsoft declined to comment. 

AI Surge

The AI-fueled surge in US data center construction coincides with a broader manufacturing boost spurred by the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act – the signature subsidy programs for semiconductors and clean energy enacted in 2022 under President Joe Biden. 

Those investments, along with data center expansion and other factors, are expected to drive electricity demand up by 15% to 20% over the next decade, according to the Energy Department. Data centers could consume as much as 9% of US electricity generation annually by 2030, up from 4% of total load in 2023, according to a report in May by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.

The Biden administration has said renewables such as wind and solar, as well as battery storage and energy efficiency gains, are some of the best ways to meet growing data center energy demand because they are rapidly scalable and cost competitive.

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“Near-term data center driven electricity demand growth is an opportunity to accelerate the build out of clean energy solutions, improve demand flexibility, and modernize the grid while maintaining affordability,” the Energy Department said in a blog post last month. 

However, the agency, which is set to release an assessment of energy consumption by data centers by years’ end, cautioned that projections of growth in electricity demand “continue to evolve due to developing use cases” and other factors.