MEMO: Trump’s Clean Energy EO Sabotages American AI, Raises Costs 

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Lori Lodes, Executive Director, Climate Power

RE: Trump’s Clean Energy Executive Order Sabotages American AI, Raises Costs

As President Trump travels to Pennsylvania for a summit on energy and AI, his visit highlights the “sledgehammer” he and Republicans in Congress have taken to homegrown, abundant American clean energy. Through Executive Orders and a new rate hike inflicted on the American public by the Republican reconciliation bill, American AI leadership and innovation are under new threat, leaving the industry with a lack of stability and everyone from households to data centers on the hook for skyrocketing electricity costs. 

Trump’s executive actions, tariffs, and uncertainty have already taken a heavy toll on American clean energy manufacturing and production, even before the Republican budget bill was signed last week, with over 90,000 clean energy jobs lost or threatened. But that budget bill was rushed through as a blunt instrument to aggressively halt the explosive growth of wind, solar, and battery power – which together accounted for 94% of all the energy capacity added last year.

Nonpartisan analysts at Energy Innovation project that the budget bill will severely impact the addition of energy capacity to the grid, leading to a loss of 340GW in new generation capacity by 2035. To put that in perspective, that’s losing the equivalent of more than a quarter of the total 1,300 GW of installed generation capacity that the U.S added last year. Simply put, this blow to the American energy supply will make it impossible to keep up with dramatically rising demand from AI and data centers, driving up electricity prices across the board. According to Goldman Sachs, energy demand from data centers is expected to grow by 160% by 2030.

As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “AI companies have been leading backers of technologies including solar projects and battery storage,” and lobbied more than 30 Republican Senators to protect clean energy tax credits. “Energy is the pacing challenge of our industry,” said Cy McNeill, director of federal energy policy for the Data Center Coalition representing AI platforms including Google, Meta, and Amazon.

While that AI advocacy helped push the Senate to salvage a few remnants of clean energy tax credits in the final legislation, astoundingly Trump promptly issued an executive order attempting to override the Senate’s meager moves toward moderation, announcing his intent to block new wind, solar, and battery projects as aggressively as possible and stretching the limits of agency interpretations at Treasury and the Department of Interior.

Now, as Trump meets with top AI and technology executives, his actions threaten to critically sabotage American AI ambitions, leaving them bereft of energy solutions for their exponentially growing demand, and faced with choosing between skyrocketing power costs in America, fleeing to China where wind and solar are growing at breakneck speed, or in some pipedreams fleeing to the Middle East to make America even more reliant on foreign oil than ever before. 

If President Trump does not relent on the implementation of his executive order, he will have not only completely forfeited the energy race to China, but the AI race as well. And American households, squeezed between increasing energy demand and paltry supply, with tax credits for home energy efficiency upgrades also having been repealed, will have nowhere to turn to avoid utility bills skyrocketing by even greater amounts every year.

• John Ketchum, President and CEO, NextEra Energy: “If we take renewables off the table, we are going to have a real power shortage problem… We’ll create our own reliability problem just by not having enough electrons to be able to satisfy all the demand we’re going to see. We’ll lose the AI race.”
• Matt Eggers, managing director, Prelude Ventures: “Eliminating those incentives would hobble our nascent AI industry and stall efforts at onshoring advanced manufacturing. The United States would surrender market share to nations that view energy abundance as a strategic asset, forfeit high‑quality jobs and slow the very innovation that keeps us competitive.”
• Doug Lewin, Texas energy analyst: “As it stands, the budget bill would worsen the energy outlook for reliability & affordability, and harm our economic competitiveness & growth. It’s the opposite of abundance or dominance; it would result in energy scarcity, inflation, and submission.”
• Avery Ash, Head of Government Affairs, Securing America’s Future Energy: “This is outright energy surrender—all but guaranteeing Chinese dominance of critical minerals, industrial supply chains, and AI development. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.”