Image: White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios and White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks applaud President Trump signing executive order accelerating federal permitting for AI data centers. Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.

One of the defining characteristics of American life in the twenty-first century is its extreme imbalance: excess amid scarcity. While the world teems with a surplus of disposable consumer goods, essentials like healthcare, housing, education, and energy are prohibitively expensive. Much of this imbalance is by design. Powerful corporations profit from distorting public goods into private commodities, and individual and collective choices are replaced by corporate prescriptions that do not meet our needs. This dynamic is particularly visible in the tech industry forcing artificial intelligence into every corner of our lives, regardless of whether it is wanted.

What companies produce has long been decoupled from what people need. But the onslaught of generative AI, which definitionally seeks to replace human capabilities—human thought, connection, problem-solving, creativity—drives home that corporations have no intrinsic commitment to upholding the value of human life and labor. The rise of artificial intelligence presents an urgent opportunity to articulate new boundaries that safeguard people’s agency and wellbeing.

Amid extraordinary levels of income inequality, and an affordability crisis that branches out into every domain of daily life, letting moneyed interests continue to dictate what is scarce and what is abundant is deepening our problems. To break out of this paradigm, we have to assert what we decide has value. What public goods do we want more of, and what harms do we want less of? We need a vision of shared prosperity to counter the corporate-backed vision of abundance via deregulation.

An Abundance of Data Centers

The abundance ideology championed across the political spectrum by technocratic liberals and conservatives alike aims to peel back protective and procedural laws to hasten the construction of all sorts of infrastructure. Abundance advocates complain about how hard it is to build at speed and scale in America, but massive data centers for artificial intelligence are being built at an extraordinary rate all over the country. As JS Tan points out in Value Added, “what looks like procedural paralysis is, in fact, a system that privileges powerful actors. The problem then isn’t that America has lost the capacity to build—it has lost the capacity to build for the public.”

To hasten building new energy infrastructure, including to power AI data centers, abundance proponents and the Trump administration alike support limiting environmental review and expediting permitting under laws including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. While some argue that deregulation will disproportionately benefit clean energy projects, right-leaning “energy abundance” advocates are clear that they want fossil fuels to benefit from rollbacks, too. Their center-left counterparts have generally supported legislative trade-offs that benefit fossil fuels as well. With energy demand from AI data centers sharply increasing, and the availability of power being a key limitation for Big Tech companies in their rush to gain the upper hand in the AI race, the abundance agenda’s call to loosen environmental regulations for faster building supports Big Tech running roughshod over our climate goals. Blanket deregulation in the name of energy abundance puts affordable and clean energy out of reach for the public, while speeding the rapacious and polluting buildout of AI.

The staggering amount of capital being poured into the indiscriminate expansion of AI is not only coming at the cost of alternative, worthier investments. The buildout is exacerbating longstanding crises: the skyrocketing price of electricity for residential consumers around the country, water shortages in drought-ridden western states, widespread use of forever chemicals without adequate risk assessment, and air pollution from fossil fuels that causes illness and death.

Tech companies are siphoning money from ratepayers and taxpayers to fund the AI boom. States are losing billions of dollars a year in tax revenue to subsidize data center growth, and aren’t reaping clear economic benefit. Data centers require a large, constant, long-term supply of power, driving up local electricity costs, but don’t create many long-term local jobs. Analysis from Business Insider found that it costs $2 million in tax breaks for data centers to create a single full-time position. (And if AI enthusiasts are right, the data center’s output will also eliminate jobs.) While some states are looking to pass laws regulating data center impacts, others are continuing to incentivize their construction. And the federal government is not only rolling out the red carpet for the AI industry—it’s looking to cut back any red tape that stands in the way of tech and fossil fuel companies’ mutualistic dominance, and to block states from regulating AI.

Trump’s Abundance Agenda for Fossil Fueled AI

Under Trump, a bipartisan abundance caucus in Congress continues to pursue opportunities to weaken environmental laws, even as the administration moves to strangle renewables, and ignores and circumvents existing environmental rules in every way it can. By tilting the field of debate towards deregulation, the abundance agenda touted by ostensible liberals has created a permission structure for the Trump administration’s disregard of public input, transparency, and existing law.

Today, we see an increasing cohesion between the agendas of Big Tech and Big Oil—particularly the large incumbent players in both industries—united by the administration’s willingness to back their current plays for economic dominance. While the largest tech firms are running full steam ahead towards building out energy-guzzling data centers for artificial intelligence, fossil fuel corporations are eager to seize upon this skyrocketing source of energy demand to preserve the profitability of polluting energy sources. Trump’s authoritarian toolkit and rank climate denialism have created welcoming conditions for tech companies to abandon the pretense of their net zero commitments, and for fossil fuel companies to frame their destructive business model as essential to economic growth.

The Trump administration is emboldening both industries’ rapaciousness by:

• Declaring an energy emergency that empowers federal agencies to expedite fossil energy permits and circumvent environmental law;

• Funneling tens of billions in new subsidies for oil and gas companies;

• Offering federal lands for data centers and expediting their permits only if the data centers are powered by fossil fuels;

• Fast-tracking the approval of forever chemicals used in data centers;

• Weakening the Clean Air Act’s application to construction activities, particularly to benefit data centers;

• Keeping coal plants operating longer to power AI data centers, and granting them exemptions from Clean Air Act limits on releases of toxic chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and benzene;

• Failing to enforce existing environmental laws;

• Offering plum defense contracts to AI firms; and

• Embedding AI use across the federal government’s operations.

If and when the AI bubble bursts, ordinary Americans with exposure to the stock market—whose current growth is heavily tethered to AI spending—will suffer financially. In the meantime, the buildout of AI is also materially consequential, involving chips and servers and massive warehouse-like data centers that use fresh water, chemicals, and electricity from the grid or onsite power plants. The sources of electricity for powering AI in the United States are often gas plants that worsen air quality locally and increase warming globally. As Americans increasingly pay for the buildout of AI data centers through their electricity bills, they are subsidizing not only the “social problem” of AI, as Hamilton Nolan frames it, but the toxic and planet-heating pollution it produces.

Reclaiming the Future

Today, corporations aspiring for global economic dominance are allowed to undermine the energy transition and jeopardize the stability of planetary systems in order to develop a technology that, without guardrails, will likely cause mass unemployment, further poison information ecosystems, and turbocharge mass surveillance. By opposing new regulation and seeking the government’s support for rapidly developing AI at a speed that outpaces safeguards, tech companies have joined fossil fuel companies in gambling our future for profit. We must demand a capable government that is willing to regulate these powerful industries, and to advance public alternatives that expand access and opportunity. What would the priorities of a government that acted decisively to meet people’s needs and combat crises look like?

• Instead of algorithmic predictions replacing choice and curation in what information you consume, we could create public options for media—public social media platforms and more investment in public newsrooms—that offer people the chance to connect online and consume information without fear of a business model designed to foster addiction and enable radicalization.

• Instead of allowing monopolistic corporations to derail the energy transition to build out AI, governments could ensure that communities receive the benefits of new renewable energy projects and power grid upgrades, while taking a market-shaping approach of strategically investing in and regulating AI development to meet public needs and prevent social and environmental harm.

• Instead of federal subsidies for fossil fuel extraction, we could have a Federal Public Power Program that builds public renewables and transmission infrastructure at speed and scale around the country.

• Instead of weakening public interest groups’ ability to sue the government for procedural violations during the environmental permitting process, we could strengthen the substance of existing safeguards under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other bedrock laws, empowering federal agencies to act decisively to protect ecosystems and natural resources.

• Instead of weak ethics standards for the Supreme Court, Congress, and political appointees in the executive branch, we could strengthen public trust through robust ethics reforms that make SCOTUS recusals enforceable and reviewable, prohibit stock trading by public officials, limit the revolving door between regulators and regulated industry, and further reforms.

• Instead of allowing the courts to undermine the National Labor Relations Board and its foundational statute, the National Labor Relations Act, legislative intervention is needed to ensure that the NLRB can adequately protect workers against employer malpractice, including as Big Tech companies seek to undermine their workers’ labor power. Every stage of the AI development and use process poses novel risks for workers, whether that’s exposure to traumatic content in training AI models; exposure to toxic chemicals used by AI data centers; or the impacts of AI use on job security, bargaining power, creative control, and more. Pro-worker state governments can step up to help fill the void as the Trump administration leaves the agency languishing without quorum, taking steps to promote workers’ say in AI in the workplace.

Read the first installment in this joint series from Climate and Community Institute, “When AI Comes to Town,” here.