The Trump administration released its AI Action Plan last week. Described as a blueprint to “win the AI race,” it marks the most articulated expression of its AI policy so far.
On the same day, President Trump signed three related executive orders, focusing on the AI policy priorities outlined in the plan: promoting the export of the American AI technology stack; accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure; and preventing the federal government’s use of so-called “woke” AI.
For energy and data centers, the plan is an ode to deregulation and a confirmation of the administration’s preferential treatment of fossil fuels over renewables.
“Build, Baby, Build!” it reads, vowing to reject “radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape” and streamline the construction of qualifying projects. These include big data centers with over 100 megawatts of load and $500 million in committed capital expenditures; supporting energy infrastructure, such as transmission lines and gas pipelines; and gas, coal, nuclear, geothermal, or other “dispatchable baseload energy sources” supporting a data center. Note the missing renewables, even combined with storage.
To achieve this goal, the plan, as outlined in one of the executive orders, is to sidestep the National Environmental Policy Act’s environmental impact studies by creating “categorical exclusions” for the qualifying projects. (The Trump administration, with help from the courts and the congressional GOP, is working to unravel NEPA more broadly as well.) It also aims to expand the FAST-41 program, which streamlines federal permitting processes for large infrastructure projects, to include data centers and related energy infrastructure.
And it’s making federal land available for AI infrastructure. Just a few hours after the plan was released, the Department of Energy announced it had selected its first federal sites: at Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, and Savannah River Site, in Georgia.
The plan does acknowledge the urgent need to upgrade and stabilize the grid, but — in an echo of the Department of Energy’s reliability study issued earlier this month — it suggests doing so by delaying the decommissioning of power plants and embracing new technologies like geothermal, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion. Again, no mention of renewables, even as it calls for prioritizing “the interconnection of reliable, dispatchable power sources as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, a directive circulated earlier this month requires all wind and solar projects on federal lands to be reviewed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. This is widely seen as yet another attempt to hamstring the clean energy industry, rather than leverage the resources to meet load growth.
This attitude towards clean energy puts the U.S. AI strategy in direct contrast with China’s.
Just a couple of days after the Trump administration’s release of its action plan, China came forward with its own. This weekend, at the opening ceremony for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Premier Li Qiang unveiled an “Action Plan on Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence.” The plan is much less detailed than the U.S. one, but it stresses a commitment to “sustainable AI” and to responding to “energy and environmental issues.” It comes two weeks after China mandated new data centers in “national hub nodes” to use at least 80% green electricity.
This approach plays into China’s strength; the country has become a renewables stronghold. But it also plays a role in China’s plan to become a global leader of both AI and the energy transition.. The plan unveiled this weekend calls for establishing a global AI cooperation organization in collaboration with the United Nations, to promote international cooperation on tech development and regulation.
Matt Pearl, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ strategic technologies program, said China is actively looking to contrast with the strategic posture of the U.S.; it’s a strategy based on collaboration, versus one based on dominating via exporting U.S. technologies.
“The U.S. plan continues with an America-first, America-led approach, and I think the reason the People’s Republic of China put out this document was to emphasize that they’re taking a multilateral, global public goods approach to things, with UN collaboration,” he said, adding that it’s unclear how much of this is true, and how much of it is just messaging.
But China’s embrace of clean energy for AI is certainly a part of their desire to contrast with the U.S., he added. “I think the hope is that they can take advantage of tensions between the U.S. and the European Union, for which green energy is a priority, for instance,” Pearl said. “They’ll see if they can use that as a policy affinity that they could take advantage of to bring them in closer cooperation and alignment.”
The question from here is whether China is actually willing to “walk the walk” in terms of establishing global, multilateral cooperation for AI. China’s “willingness to learn from the rest of the world, including especially the U.S.,” both in terms of technologies and policies, can be a competitive advantage, Pearl said, as it was when the country was industrializing. And if so, China could pull ahead in the technology race.
But a multilateral approach could benefit the U.S. as well, even if there are no indications that the current administration would be willing to entertain one. “Every country is doing things that are in its self-interest,” Pearl said. “But seeing whether multilateral institutions and processes provide opportunities, and being flexible about them, means that you have the ability to maximize U.S. influence, depending on how things develop.”
A version of this story was published in the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter on July 30. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus expert analysis, original reporting, and curated resources — in your inbox every Wednesday.
