(Bloomberg) — OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang met with Biden administration officials and industry leaders at the White House to discuss steps to address massive infrastructure needs for artificial intelligence projects.
Most read articles on Bloomberg
Other technology attendees at the meeting included Anthropocene CEO Dalio Amodei, Google President Ruth Porat, Amazon.com Inc. cloud chief Matt Gurman and Microsoft President Brad Smith, according to a White House statement about the meeting on Thursday. Administration officials in attendance included Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
After the meeting, the White House announced the creation of an interagency task force to help promote data center development in the U.S. and speed up permitting for those facilities. These steps are aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership in AI, where rapid advances in the industry will require significant investments in data centers and energy supplies.
The Department of Energy will guide data center owners and operators to resources including loans, grants and tax credits that can help them find clean and reliable power sources, according to a White House statement. Energy industry attendees included Calvin Butler, CEO of Exceleon.
For example, OpenAI plans to spend tens of billions of dollars in global investments to advance domestic AI infrastructure across data centers, energy capacity and transmission, and semiconductor manufacturing. Company executives have been meeting with government officials for months about a range of issues related to the effort, including possible national security concerns related to foreign investment.
The discussion came on the same day that OpenAI announced a new artificial intelligence model it has internally named “Strawberry” that can perform human-like reasoning tasks, a step that signals the intensification of the competition.
“OpenAI believes infrastructure is destiny and that building more infrastructure in the United States is critical to the country’s industrial policy and economic future,” OpenAI said in a statement Thursday. The company highlighted the economic benefits of investing in U.S. data center projects, including the potential to create 40,000 jobs across multiple states. OpenAI pointed to similar investments by China, which aims to be the global AI leader in 10 years’ time.
The story continues
Porat said a strong American energy infrastructure is essential for American leadership in the emerging field of AI. “Today’s meeting at the White House was an important opportunity to advance the work needed to modernize and expand the capacity of America’s energy grid,” he said in a statement.
Anthropic and Microsoft declined to comment.
The AI-driven surge in U.S. data center construction coincides with a broader manufacturing boost spurred by the Chips and Science Act and the Stop Inflation Act, signature subsidy programs for semiconductors and clean energy enacted in 2022 under President Joe Biden.
Those investments, along with data center expansion and other factors, are expected to drive electricity demand by 15% to 20% over the next decade, according to the Department of Energy. A May report from the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute estimated that data centers could consume 9% of annual U.S. electricity generation by 2030, up from 4% of the total load in 2023.
The Biden administration says renewable energy such as wind and solar, battery storage and increased energy efficiency are among the best ways to meet the growing energy needs of data centers because they are rapidly scalable and cost-competitive.
“Near-term electricity demand growth from data centers presents an opportunity to accelerate the buildout of clean energy solutions, increase demand flexibility, and modernize the electric grid while maintaining affordability,” the Department of Energy said in a blog post last month.
But the agency, which is due to publish the results of its assessment of data center energy consumption by the end of the year, warned that its forecast electricity demand growth will “continue to change” due to “evolving use cases” and other factors.
–With assistance from Courtney Rozen.
(Updates with White House statement and new OpenAI model from second paragraph onwards.)
Most read articles on Bloomberg Businessweek
©2024 Bloomberg LP
