Trump Tells Big Tech: Your Power Woes? Totally Fixable

President Donald Trump has pledged to sort out the power and grid connection nightmares plaguing the US datacenter industry.

The Orange One made the remarks at a White House dinner where he hosted many of Silicon Valley's top brass, a gathering that turned into a mutual admiration society as executives queued up to shower Trump with praise.

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The figureheads for Big Tech included Bill Gates, Tim Apple, OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Google's Sundar Pichai, and IBM's Arvind Krishna, while Meta head Mark Zuckerberg sat at the President's right hand.

"Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It's a very refreshing change," Altman said, according to the Wall Street Journal. "I think it's going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn't be happening without your leadership."

Trump opened proceedings by outlining his administration's plans to remove obstacles to connecting datacenters to the electricity grid at the federal level, though many challenges will likely have to be handled by individual states.

"We're making it very easy for you in terms of electric capacity and getting it for you, getting your permits."

America is already home to a significant proportion of global datacenter capacity, but the current industry craze for AI, and Washington's obsession with staying ahead of China in a purported AI arms race, has seen a rising tide of investment in new bit barns.

Last month, it was disclosed that the datacenter capex of Amazon's cloud biz alone exceeds $100 billion per year, making it roughly comparable to the entire GDP of Costa Rica, for example, with similar figures for other US internet giants.

Some of the new builds are monsters as well. Meta announced plans in July for several multi-gigawatt datacenter campuses, one of which could come close in size to Manhattan.

The problem is finding enough power for all these mega projects, as well as physically connecting them up to the grid. A report from Deloitte Insights in June warned that the energy required by all these bit barns in the US may be more than 30 times greater in a decade, and there is currently a seven-year wait on some requests for connection to the grid.

Americans could face a 70 percent hike in their electricity bills by 2030, unless urgent action is taken to boost energy generation and transmission capacity to meet the increasing demand.

President Trump issued an executive order in July to ease the regulatory burdens covering datacenters and infrastructure to power them, including high‑voltage transmission lines and generating plants, speeding up permitting and approvals for such projects.

• UK datacenter developers turn to gas rather than wait for grid power for builds
• Molten salt nuclear reactors slated to power Google datacenters in 2030
• Datacenters have a public image problem, industry confesses to The Reg
• Schneider Electric says US grid will be less stable by 2030 as datacenter demand rises

In one of his last acts as a leader in January, former President Joe Biden signed a similar executive order, intended to speed construction of bit barns and power infrastructure on federal land.

The current administration seems to have a fetish for nuclear power, with the US Department of Energy (DoE) recently naming ten companies it will work with to fast track advanced atomic reactor projects as part of another Trump initiative.

Last month, South Korean conglomerate Hyundai was chosen to build nuclear reactors in Texas to provide up to six gigawatts of energy intended for a datacenter project.

However, one problem, according to Fabrice Coquio, France's managing director for bit barn biz Digital Realty, is connections to the grid and grid distribution.

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"In France, we need them in Paris and Marseille, and instead they are in the countryside," he told The Register in April, referring to a French government scheme to provide land close to power plants for new server farms.

The White House announced a $1 billion investment in US electrical grid infrastructure by industrial giant Hitachi Energy yesterday.

Hitachi said that the investments include $457 million for a large power transformer factory in Virginia - the datacenter capital of the world  - along with significant expansions of existing facilities throughout the country.

"Bringing production of large power transformers to the US is critical to building a strong domestic supply chain for the economy and reducing production bottlenecks, which is essential as demand for these transformers across the economy is surging." Hitachi Energy chief Andreas Schierenbeck said in a statement. ®