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Amid a flurry of AI development across the United States, Vice President J.D. Vance called for a common-sense approach to advancing this new, rapidly evolving technology that stands to change the nation forever.
“There’s a good news and a bad news with data centers,” the vice president said during remarks delivered at a machining facility in Plover, Wisconsin, on Thursday.
He continued, “Now, the good news is, you know, first of all, they’re big facilities, you create a lot of construction jobs. And this next generation of the technological revolution, you need those data centers to make that run. Those data centers are like the gasoline of the technology revolution that we’re going to see over the next 75 years. And I don’t know about you all, but I want America to win that technology revolution. I don’t want China or some other country to win it – and so that’s why we’ve got to have these things.”
On the “bad news” side, the vice president explained that the data centers could pose an energy crisis.
“If those centers are built, and the local governments aren’t ensuring that there’s enough power for those data centers, then it’s going to increase electricity costs for everybody else,” he said.
The vice president said that the administration’s vision to address this future problem was to coordinate local, state, and federal government efforts to enable data centers to build their own power centers to supply their own energy.
“What I think we ought to be working toward is, you build those data centers and electricity costs come DOWN for American citizens instead of going UP for American citizens,” Vice President Vance said.
He added, “The data centers can afford it. We’ve gotta make sure that they’re good neighbors, so that when they come in and build these great buildings, the people in their neighborhood, the people in their community benefit too, and that’s through lower power – that’s the best way they can be good neighbors.”
The vice president’s comments come just days after President Donald Trump announced in his State of the Union speech a new policy, the “Rate Payer Protection Pledge” for these monstrously behemoth data centers that require city-sized energy to operate.
The president said that this pledge tells major tech companies that they have the “obligation to provide for their own power needs.”
Few other details have been announced since then, but U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Politico’s E&E News that “all of the brand-name hyperscalers” had signed onto this special pact negotiated by the president.