In attendance on the industry side were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith and Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang, according to a readout from the White House.
Alphabet President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat, Meta Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman also participated in the meeting.
They were joined on the govenrment side by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, as well as several senior White House officials, including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, national economic adviser Lael Brainard and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
The White House convened the meeting to discuss the clean energy, permitting and work force needs for developing the large-scale data centers and power infrastructure required for AI.
Following the roundtable, the administration announced several new initiatives focused on building out data center capacity, including a Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure and efforts to scale up technical assistance for data center permitting.
“These actions will enable datacenters catalyzing the industries of the future to be built here in the United States by American workers,” the White House said in its readout.
Google’s Porat described Thursday’s meeting as an “important opportunity to advance the work required to modernize and expand the capacity of America’s energy grid.”
An AWS spokesperson similarly said in a statement that it “appreciated the opportunity” to “discuss efforts to ensure AI development in the US and the needs to modernize the nation’s utility grid, expedite permitting for new projects, and ensure timely grid connections for carbon-free energy projects.”
AI requires significant amounts of energy. A single request to OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much energy as a typical Google search, according to the International Energy Agency.
And image generation requires more than 60 times the energy of text generation, a study by Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face found.
AI’s increased energy demands have thrown a wrench in major tech companies’ efforts to rein in their emissions. Google’s emissions have risen 48 percent since 2019, while Microsoft’s emissions have grown 29 percent since 2020. Both have pointed to AI.
