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Title: AI Industry Tells US Congress: 'We Need Energy'

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/...

The Washington Post reports: The United States urgently needs more energy to
fuel an artificial intelligence race with China that the country can't afford
to lose, industry leaders told lawmakers at a House hearing on Wednesday. "We
need energy in all forms," said Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who now
leads the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank focused on
technology and security. "Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be
there, and it needs to be there quickly." It was a nearly unanimous sentiment
at the four-hour-plus hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee,
which revealed bipartisan support for ramping up U.S. energy production to
meet skyrocketing demand for energy-thirsty AI data centers. The hearing
showed how the country's AI policy priorities have changed under President
Donald Trump. President Joe Biden's wide-ranging 2023 executive order on AI
had sought to balance the technology's potential rewards with the risks it
poses to workers, civil rights and national security. Trump rescinded that
order within days of taking office, saying its "onerous" requirements would
"threaten American technological leadership...." [Data center power
consumption] is already straining power grids, as residential consumers
compete with data centers that can use as much electricity as an entire city.
And those energy demands are projected to grow dramatically in the coming
years... [Former Google CEO Eric] Schmidt, whom the committee's Republicans
called as a witness on Wednesday, told [committee chairman Brett] Guthrie
that winning the AI race is too important to let environmental considerations
get in the way... Once the United States beats China to develop
superintelligence, Schmidt said, AI will solve the climate crisis. And if it
doesn't, he went on, China will become the world's sole superpower.
(Schmidt's view that AI will become superintelligent within a decade is
controversial among experts, some of whom predict the technology will remain
limited by fundamental shortcomings in its ability to plan and reason.) The
industry's wish list also included "light touch" federal regulation, high-
skill immigration and continued subsidies for chip development. Alexandr
Wang, the young billionaire CEO of San Francisco-based Scale AI, said a
growing patchwork of state privacy laws is hampering AI companies' access to
the data needed to train their models. He called for a federal privacy law
that would preempt state regulations and prioritize innovation. Some
committee Democrats argued that cuts to scientific research and renewable
energy will actually hamper America's AI competitiveness, according to the
article. " But few questioned the premise that the U.S. is locked in an
existential struggle with China for AI supremacy. "That stark outlook has
nearly coalesced into a consensus on Capitol Hill since China's DeepSeek
chatbot stunned the AI industry with its reasoning skills earlier this year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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