“We need double the energy we currently have in the United States—can you imagine? For AI to really be as big as we want to have it,” President Donald Trump proclaimed at the World Economic Forum in January 2025. In his first action fulfilling his promises for AI, Trump announced $500 billion for a new joint venture, Project Stargate, in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. This initiative seeks to expand AI infrastructure, including the energy resources that power it.
Data centers have enormous energy demands to power AI. They strain existing electric grids in the United States, consuming 147 terawatt-hours (TWh) of power in 2023 (3.7 percent of total US power demand). While McKinsey projects data center power demand will reach 606 TWh by 2030 (11.7 percent of total US power demand), global demand could reach 1000 TWh by 2026—the current electric consumption of Japan. Growing electricity demand from data centers could warrant fossil fuel expansion, as President Trump suggests, or it could harness newly developed and available renewable resources.
Wind and solar-generated power combined with Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) offer a reliable solution for new data centers—with infrastructure that is more readily available and reliable than ever before. While tech and energy industries, in addition to several Republican lawmakers, are beginning to embrace clean energy as a reliable and readily scalable source of power, the Trump administration may realize that it should too, if it wants to achieve its ambitious AI goals.
A few days before retaking office, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” to enlarge domestic fossil fuel and critical mineral production, suggesting the United States needs to build more coal and natural gas-burning power plants to fuel the growing number of AI data centers. However, new infrastructure will only be ready to connect to the grid by 2026 at the earliest; meanwhile, in 2024, 94 percent of new US power plants were carbon-free. Jigar Shah, the former director of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) under the Biden administration, which grants billions of dollars in government loans to private companies, spoke about the rise in power demands for data centers and other facilities: “Every one of them needs power, and guess what’s getting connected right now? Batteries, solar, wind.” New renewable resources are now accessible thanks to the work of the Biden administration over the past few years to give grants, loans, and completed permits to industry developers of solar, wind, geothermal, and BESS technology. The readiness of these options makes them more efficient and economical for new centers rather than building new fossil fuel plants.
The private sector is already warming up to clean energy sources. Data center developers, including big fish like Amazon and Microsoft, are procuring renewable energy through Power Purchase Agreements with local utilities. Google and Microsoft have both pledged to transition their data centers to 100 percent renewable energy, with Google writing, “data centers are a key part of Google’s journey toward net-zero carbon,” noting the company’s goal to “run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate.”
President Trump’s fossil fuel favoritism and anti-clean energy stance conflicts with the practicality of expanding AI and his urgent aspiration to establish the United States as a global leader in AI in light of China’s competitive edge with the groundbreaking launch of DeepSeek. However, Trump’s second administration may be more inclined not to let the historically politicized nature of clean energy jeopardize his more urgent goals to expand AI and establish energy dominance.
When entering office for his second term, Trump made it clear that he would advance fossil fuel energy. However, the new administration’s actions and rhetoric toward clean energy have been contradictory thus far. The president issued a memo calling for a federal funding freeze in late January. The freeze, soon overruled by a judge, explicitly revoked funding from projects aligned with the aims of the ‘Green New Deal’ and halted DOE loans. As the Washington Post writes, “Trump took office and vowed to cut back clean energy projects.” Two weeks later, though, he signed approval for one of the loans promised under Biden’s DOE to Montana Renewables for developing sustainable aviation. Of the DOE’s LPO awards announced under the Biden administration, there are still $47 billion in conditionally promised loans that have not been distributed. One week Trump illegally attempted to withhold all of the loans; he soon after approved a $782 million loan to Montana Renewables. In his “energy emergency” executive order, one line reads, “We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy”—experts regard the term “diversified” as being inclusive of clean energy technologies.
Shah thinks the DOE under Trump-appointed Chris Wright will come around to clean energy, including for AI projects: “Folks are going to do their planning, and they’re going to figure out what are the right resources for us to move forward with… 90 percent of everything that you can add over the next four years that are ready to go happen to be clean.”
Likewise, there is a shift in the rhetoric around clean energy among Republican lawmakers, interpreting the Trumpian term “energy dominance” to promote both renewable and non-renewable domestic energy production. In January, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) strongly criticized Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency for heavy-handed regulations while also urging Trump to embrace clean energy: “If we want to restore our energy dominance, we have to start saying ‘yes’ to American energy. ‘Yes’ to an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes everything from oil and gas to hydropower and biofuels—everything. We need all of it.” Republican states are also home to the most LPO grant recipients and have seen the economic benefits of Biden-era investments in clean energy technology.
Paul Bledsoe, climate advisor under former President Bill Clinton, said in February, “Republican members know clean energy is a huge success story and the question is whether they will fall in line and repeal incentives because of this culture war. That is the crux of it and it’s unclear what will happen.”
Similar to the language Republicans are using to endorse clean energy, the industry is strongly levying the “energy dominance” narrative and moving away from politically inflammatory phrases. Solar executives have been lobbying the Trump administration with the American energy dominance angle and are rhetorically shifting away from climate impacts. Montana Renewables CEO Bruce Fleming made a statement after Trump signed the loan in which he “downplayed the project’s connection to climate change,” instead discussing its benefit to farmers, the Washington Post writes, as “many clean energy executives in the Trump era” are doing. In his statement, Flemming said, “This is not the Green New Deal.”
Like clean energy executives and a growing number of Republican lawmakers, many AI and technology executives do not want clean energy to have a political color, and possibly neither does the new Trump administration. About the term ‘clean energy,’ Shah says, “If that’s a boogeyman word these days then that’s what it is. But those are the projects that are ready to go.” Perhaps as clean energy becomes integral to the future of US energy, regardless of the party in the Executive Office, it is becoming a “boogeyman word” of the past. For ‘green’ energy to progress, providing a practical option to power proliferating data centers and helping decarbonize industries, clean energy needs to de-emphasize the ‘green’ and become further politically neutralized.