OpenAI, Nvidia CEOs Discuss AI Infrastructure Needs With Biden Officials

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang met with senior Biden administration officials and other industry leaders at the White House, where they discussed steps to address the massive infrastructure needs of artificial intelligence projects.

On the technology side, attendees also included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google President Ruth Porat, Amazon.com Inc. cloud chief Matt Garman and Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith, according to a White House statement at Thursday’s meeting. Administration officials included Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Following the talks, the White House announced an interagency task force to help spur data center development in the United States and initiatives to support expedited permitting for such facilities. These steps are aimed at ensuring that the United States maintains its leadership in AI, where rapid advances in the industry require significant investments in data centers and power supplies.

The Energy Department will also direct data center owners and operators to resources such as loans, grants and tax credits that can help them find clean, reliable energy sources, according to a White House statement. Attendees from the energy industry included Exeleon CEO Calvin Butler.

OpenAI, for example, plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on a project to boost domestic AI infrastructure including data centers, power and transmission capacity, and semiconductor manufacturing — with investment from around the world. Company executives have been meeting with government officials for months on a range of issues related to the initiative, including potential national security concerns about foreign capital.

The discussions took place on the same day. OpenAI announced a new artificial intelligence model internally called “Strawberry” that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, a move that shows how fierce the competition is.

“OpenAI believes that infrastructure is destiny and that building more infrastructure in the United States is critical to the nation’s industrial policy and economic future,” OpenAI said in a statement Thursday. The company highlighted the economic benefits of investing in U.S. data center projects, including the potential creation of 40,000 jobs across several states. OpenAI pointed to similar investments by China, which aims to become a global AI leader by the end of the decade.

Porat called a strong U.S. energy infrastructure critical to ensuring America’s leadership in the emerging field of AI. “Today’s White House meeting is an important opportunity to advance the work needed to modernize and expand the capacity of the U.S. electric grid,” she said in a statement.

Anthropic and Microsoft declined to comment.

The AI-fueled surge in U.S. data center construction coincides with a broader manufacturing surge spurred by the Science and Chips Act and the Deflation Relief Act — special subsidy programs for semiconductors and clean energy enacted in 2022 under President Joe Biden.

Those investments, along with data center expansion and other factors, are expected to drive electricity demand up 15% to 20% over the next decade, according to the Department of Energy. Data centers could consume as much as 9% of annual U.S. electricity by 2030, up from 4% of total load in 2023, according to a May report by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.

The Biden administration says renewable energy sources like wind and solar, as well as battery storage and increased energy efficiency, are some of the best ways to meet growing data center energy needs because they are rapidly scalable and cost-competitive.

“The near-term growth in electricity demand driven by data centers presents an opportunity to accelerate the buildout of clean energy solutions, improve demand flexibility, and modernize the grid while maintaining affordability,” the Department of Energy said in a blog post last month.

However, the agency, which will release its assessment of data center energy consumption later this year, warned that forecasts for electricity demand growth “continue to change due to evolving use cases” and other factors.

–With assistance from Courtney Rozen.

(Updates with White House statement and new OpenAI model, starting in second paragraph.)

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