Trump’s EPA pick wants to make the US the AI capital of the world

Donald Trump just tapped former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Zeldin's first public pledge after getting the gig? To help unleash US energy dominance and make America the AI capital of the world.

Green tape vs. hungry GPUs

The EPA's primary mission has historically been regulating polluters, keeping drinking water clean, and capping emissions. But as AI models explode in scale, computing power has run straight into a power grid bottleneck.

According to Goldman Sachs Research, data center power demand is on track to surge 160% by 2030. Even though tech giants like Google and Microsoft have been snapping up nuclear deals and renewable energy contracts, their actual carbon footprints keep swelling.

Today, roughly 60% of US electricity still comes from fossil fuels. If you want tens of gigawatts of new computing power online fast, traditional dirty power is still the quickest way to get it.

Trump made his intentions clear on Truth Social, writing that Zeldin will push swift deregulatory decisions to unleash business growth. During his sit-down with Joe Rogan a few weeks ago, Trump openly vented that environmental reviews hold up building projects for 10 to 15 years, noting that doing things clean costs far more money.

A battle over the rulebook

Environmental groups are already sounding alarms over Zeldin's nomination.

The League of Conservation Voters gives Zeldin a lifetime environmental voting score of just 14%. Campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets reveals he accepted over $269,000 from the oil and gas industry and nearly $1.5 million from real estate donors during his congressional runs.

Back in 2017, Zeldin voted to slash the EPA’s budget by 25%, a move that could have eliminated 3,200 staff jobs at the agency.

Food & Water Watch publicly called his record solidly aligned with a pro-polluter agenda. Meanwhile, Natural Resources Defense Council president Manish Bapna argued that the US can meet booming data center demands without ditching rules that clean up dirty power plants.

Some local advocates see a small glimmer of pragmatism, noting Zeldin previously broke with Trump to oppose offshore oil drilling off Long Island.

Why it matters

AI compute is officially being treated as a matter of national strategic dominance, and environmental oversight is being positioned as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.

For tech companies and AI labs, this likely means faster local approvals and less friction when plugging massive clusters into regional grids. If clean power takes too long to build, gas and coal facilities will stay online to bridge the gap.

We think this is a double-edged sword. While it eliminates near-term red tape for infrastructure, it puts American tech giants in a precarious spot. Most Big Tech players have public net-zero commitments and global operations subject to stricter European ESG laws. Stripping away domestic baseline rules creates massive reputational and regulatory friction abroad.

More importantly, using deregulation as a shortcut relieves pressure on tech labs to engineer genuine energy-efficiency breakthroughs. Turning the global AI race into a raw fossil-fuel burning contest might get servers spinning faster this year, but it pushes massive environmental costs onto the public for decades.