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Big Tech Asked for Looser Clean Water Act Permitting. Trump Wants to Give It to Them
New AI regulations suggested by the White House mirror changes to environmental permitting suggested by Meta and a lobbying group representing firms like Google and Amazon Web Services.
In March, the Data Center Coalition (DCC), a lobbying group for the industry whose members include tech giants like Google and Amazon Web Services, wrote a public comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to its request for information to develop the AI Action Plan. The AI Action Plan also recommends exempting data centers from what’s known as pre-construction notification, an additional form that helps regulators understand the impacts of a project before it begins—another proposal that was in the DCC public comment. “For a while there was a joke that Walmarts were being built on wetlands, because it’s like, well, where’s the land that hasn’t already been developed?” says Jim McElfish, a senior adviser at the Environmental Law Institute, a research nonprofit.
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