Trump’s AI Push May Hinge on Renewable Energy

By Kyle Stock and Mark Chediak, December 5, 2025 , https://origin.www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-04/how-trump-s-renewables-roadblocks-can-stall-the-ai-boom

President Donald Trump is pro-AI and anti-renewables. But those two stances are increasingly contradictory: Data centers need quick power on the cheap, and that’s exactly what renewables offer.

Today’s newsletter takes you inside the mismatch and why opposing renewables might do more than hinder the US in the battle for AI supremacy.

The Trump administration is moving to fast-track the construction of power-hungry data centers as a matter of national security. At the same time, it’s adding roadblocks for new solar and wind farms.

But the two policies could be at odds: Hindering renewable energy projects risks slowing the AI boom — and could exacerbate rising electricity prices, a slew of data suggests.

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment right now to get the power to supply this,” said Robert Whaley, director of North American power at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. “In the next 10 years, there’s really nothing to replace renewables.”

The AI explosion — and its energy demands — is happening much faster than the pace at which utilities typically plan and build large power plants. In response, tech giants like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have taken extreme measures to keep up, cobbling together data centers in tents and signing contracts for their own power plants.

Wind and Solar Are Now Cheaper

Cost to build electricity generation in dollars per megawatt hour, based on recent projects and fuel costs

Renewable energy so far remains the fastest and cheapest option to add power to the grid. Nearly 80% of the planned power plant capacity in the pipeline is tied to renewable sources, according to filings with federal regulators and grid operators compiled by Cleanview.co, an energy data company.

The number of applications for natural gas and nuclear facilities, the options President Donald Trump is embracing to power the AI surge, is much smaller, making up about 14% of planned capacity.

The dynamic creates a potential political challenge for Trump, whose goal of using the AI boom as an engine for the American economy risks blowback at the ballot box if voters blame the data centers he’s championed for higher power bills.

“President Trump is expanding base load power from reliable energy sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear to support growing electricity demand from AI and data centers,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “Intermittent and unreliable energy sources like offshore wind that were propped up by the Green New Scam simply cannot generate the sustained power needed to make the United States the global leader in cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing.”

US New Electricity

New electrons from solar, storage and wind are expected to outnumber those of new natural gas plants almost six-fold in the next 10 years

But the cost to build solar and wind farms plummeted in the years before those incentives were scrapped. Meanwhile, building up enough gas and nuclear plants to power data centers may prove too slow and expensive. Gas turbines, critical equipment to turn natural gas into electricity, are in short supply, and even though Trump is moving to accelerate permitting of the next generation of small-modular nuclear reactors, the next wave of those aren’t expected to be built until the end of the decade at the earliest.

At this point, battery storage systems, solar arrays and wind farms are faster and cheaper to build per kilowatt of capacity than anything else, according to Lazard.

Another advantage to renewable-powered data centers is that those equipped to supply their own power during heatwaves and other emergencies can begin operations much more quickly than those reliant solely on traditional utility hookups, according to a new study by Princeton University’s ZERO Lab in conjunction with energy software firms Camus Energy and encoord.

Installing onsite natural gas turbines, solar panels or batteries means data centers can achieve a speedier connection to the grid because they will represent less of a demand stress when electricity is tight. In some cases, the wait time can be cut by as much as five years — a significant difference in an industry where grid hookups can stretch up to seven years.

Read the full stories on how renewables projects are quietly getting built