Trump Administration Moves to Accelerate AI Power Hookups

Fiber optic data cables. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — The Trump administration is pushing regulators to dramatically accelerate the process of allowing the booming data-center sector to connect to power grids.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Thursday to grant expedited reviews for data-center grid connections, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Under a draft proposed rule Wright sent to the agency, those reviews would be limited to 60 days, a seismic shift for a process that currently can drag on for years.

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Faster approvals would help President Donald Trump deliver on his artificial-intelligence ambitions and scale up an industry he sees as vital to competing with China. It also would be a boon for so-called hyperscalers keen to build new energy-hungry data centers that are increasingly confronted with concerns about how their massive appetites for electricity will impact utility bills for neighboring residential neighborhoods.

“To usher in a new era of American prosperity, we must ensure all Americans and domestic industries have access to affordable, reliable and secure electricity,” Wright wrote in a letter to FERC members. “To do this, large loads, including AI data centers, served by public utilities must be able to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly and non-discriminatory manner.”

This type of rule change has been eagerly anticipated by tech and power executives in the aftermath of the FERC’s rejection of a request by Talen Energy Corp. to directly supply an Amazon.com Inc. data center from a Pennsylvania nuclear plant.

But it also risks pushback from states grappling with soaring power demand from data centers, new factories and electric vehicles — and the resulting higher utility bills.

WATCH: The Trump administration is pushing regulators to accelerate the process of allowing for data-center connections to power grids. Matthew Bloxham of Bloomberg Intelligence has more.Source: Bloomberg

Data-center companies welcomed the proposed rules. “Then there’d be a lot more certainty when you start a project that you’d know when it would be energized,” said Raul Martynek, chief executive officer of DataBank, which operates roughly 75 data centers across the US. He praised the idea of a “shot clock” on reviews.

Under the proposed rule, data centers could win a speedy review if they include new power plants or agree to curtail usage in response to regional grid strain during high-demand periods such as heatwaves. A data center vying to locate next to an existing power plant, like the Talen-Amazon proposal, would need to undergo a study to determine if that generation capacity is needed to maintain grid reliability.

Wright said his plan is in keeping with the president’s goals of “revitalizing domestic manufacturing and driving American AI innovation, both of which will require unprecedented and extraordinary quantities of electricity,” as well as substantial investment in the nation’s power grids.

The new rules won’t significantly speed up data-center development, said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James. That’s because the bottlenecks to building data centers and power plants is obtaining specialized chips and electrical equipment like gas turbines and transformers, not grid connections, he said.

“There’s a limited capacity on the planet to do this intricate high-tech construction work,” Molchanov said in an interview. “This is still a marathon, not a sprint, just because of the engineering and physical requirements.”

Jordan Klein, a tech sector analyst at Mizuho, called the proposed rules “great news” for power producers like Constellation Energy Corp. and Vistra Corp. as well as gas-turbine manufacturer GE Vernova Inc.

Shares of Constellation were up as much as 5.9% on Friday in New York. Vistra rose as much as 5% and NRG Energy Inc. advanced as much as 3.3%. Nuclear companies buoyed by the AI boom this year also rose, with Oklo Inc. up 11% and Centrus Energy Corp. up 8%.

–With assistance from Brody Ford.

(Updates with executive’s comment in seventh paragraph.)

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