Trump's AI plan calls for massive data centers. Here's how it may affect energy in the U.S.

(24 Jul 2025) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4592457 ASSOCIATED PRESS Berkeley, California - 29 May 2025 1. Various of Doudna supercomputer facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2. Pan inside Doudna supercomputer facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 3. Official next to equipment inside Doudna supercomputer facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ASSOCIATED PRESS Portland, Oregon - 24 July 2025 4. SOUNDBITE (English) Amanda Smith, senior scientist at research organization Project Drawdown: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++ "AI is a growing portion of the energy usage of data centers. And data centers are a growing proportion of the electricity use in the US. Typically the most common thing that happens to meet increased demand is that we keep an existing power plant online. Most of our existing power plants are still producing electricity via fossil fuels." ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Hackberry, Louisiana – 1 April 2022 5. Various of flare burning at Venture Global natural gas facility ASSOCIATED PRESS Portland, Oregon - 24 July 2025 6. SOUNDBITE (English) Amanda Smith, senior scientist at research organization Project Drawdown: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++ "Power generation always has environmental impacts. But what we know is that power generation via fossil fuels tends to have much tough for environmental impacts. Both on climate change and on local populations who suffer the impacts of the pollution that it causes while it's operating." ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Hackberry, Louisiana – 1 April 2022 7. Various of Cameron LNG (liquefied natural gas) export facility ASSOCIATED PRESS Copenhagen, Denmark - 24 July 2025 8. SOUNDBITE (English) Benjamin Lee, University of Pennsylvania Engineering Professor: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++ "Most of the energy goes into powering the graphics processing units, the compute, and as these GPUs generate answers and draw power doing so, they also generate heat, which means we need water to cool those processes down to keep the machine room temperatures and a nice stable temperature. So we are talking about massive growth in data and infrastructure, energy use, and water use." ASSOCIATED PRESS Cambridge, UK - 16 April, 2025 9. Tilt down of Dawn, Cambridge University's powerful supercomputer 10. Close of bank of graphic processing units (GPUs) 11. Wide of cabinets housing Dawn and employee organising wires on ladder ASSOCIATED PRESS Copenhagen, Denmark - 24 July 2025 12. SOUNDBITE (English) Benjamin Lee, University of Pennsylvania Engineering Professor: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++ "Before the arrival of generative AI, there was a lot of optimism among all of the big tech, hyperscaler data center operators in terms of achieving carbon-free compute. At the end of 2022, we saw the advent of generative AI with ChatGPT, and it became very quickly clear that, and some of our published research as well, that it wouldn't be possible to rely on renewable energy alone, even with massive battery support to get to net zero compute, given the size of the data centers we were now building." ASSOCIATED PRESS Cambridge, UK - 16 April, 2025 13. More of Dawn, Cambridge University's powerful supercomputer ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Paxton, Illinois - 9 May 2024 14. Various of wind turbines operating ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Hackberry, Louisiana – 1 April 2022 15. Venture Global natural gas facility ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Berwick, Pennsylvania - 14 January 2025 16. Various of Amazon data center and Susquehanna nuclear power plant ASSOCIATED PRESS Copenhagen, Denmark - 24 July 2025 STORYLINE: Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives ​​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/17ee41ddf1fb4d6c8b0bd542c1c4ae30