04United States · Energy, business and technology
America’s AI race is colliding with the permitting state.
Facts
Former Trump, Biden and Obama officials are urging congressional leaders to pass broad energy-permitting reform because U.S. power infrastructure is not expanding fast enough to match China and data-centre demand.
InterpretationCongress controls the legal bottleneck, while utilities and developers supply capital; local opposition, environmental review and cost allocation constrain speed. The conservative case for reform is strong, but durable permission requires assigning grid costs to the loads creating them rather than socialising every private data-centre bet.