By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Microsoft and other AI leaders on Thursday will urge U.S. lawmakers to streamline federal permitting for artificial intelligence energy needs and open more government data sets for AI training, according to written testimony reviewed by Reuters.
“America’s advanced economy relies on 50-year-old infrastructure that cannot meet the increasing electricity demands driven by AI, reshoring of manufacturing, and increased electrification,” Microsoft President Brad Smith’s written testimony says for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “Winning the AI Race”.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will tell senators that as AI systems improve people will want to use them more, and meeting that demand will require more chips, training data, energy and supercomputers. “We want to build a brain for the world and make it super easy for people to use it, with common-sense restrictions to prevent harm,” Altman’s testimony says.
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator’s written testimony highlights the energy-intensity of AI computation, citing an Energy Department estimate that data centers’ consumption could rise to 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028 from 4.4% in 2023.
“Millions of hours of training, billions of inference queries, trillions of model parameters, and continuous dynamic scaling are all driving an insatiable hunger for compute and energy that borders on exponential,” he said.
He called for efforts “to streamline the permitting process to enable the addition of new sources of generation and the transmission infrastructure to deliver it.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su will tell senators leading in AI requires “rapidly building data centers at scale and powering them with reliable, affordable, and clean energy sources.”
She added “moving faster also means moving AI beyond the cloud. To ensure every American benefits, AI must be built into the devices we use every day and made as accessible and dependable as electricity.”
Smith called for opening U.S. government data sets for AI training, citing actions by China and the United Kingdom.
“The federal government remains one of the largest untapped sources of high-quality and high-volume data,” Smith said. “By making government data readily available for AI training, the United States can significantly accelerate the advancement of AI capabilities.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Sonali Paul)