White House officials to meet with AI leaders about data center development

Senior Biden administration officials will meet with key leaders in the artificial intelligence (AI) space Thursday to discuss the development of data centers for the power-hungry technology, according to a White House official. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will be in attendance, a source familiar with the meeting told The Hill. The meeting was first reported by CNN. 

The industry leaders will be joined 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 meeting will focus on boosting collaboration between the public and private sectors to maintain American leadership on AI, as well as meeting the technology’s workforce, permitting and infrastructure demands, the White House official said.  

“President Biden and Vice President Harris are committed to deepening U.S. leadership in A.I. by ensuring data-centers are built in the United States while ensuring the technology is developed responsibly,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said in a statement. 

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.