U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), several outlets reported on Tuesday. Zeldin, a four-term Republican congressman who lost the New York gubernatorial election in 2022, confirmed his selection in a post on X and stated a novel priority for the EPA to make the United States the “global leader” of artificial intelligence.
Vivek Chilukuri, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who has written critically on U.S. tech decoupling from China in Foreign Policy, observed: “It’s a strong signal the Trump administration will target existing environmental permitting for data centers and energy infrastructure as part of its strategy to boost American AI.”
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), several outlets reported on Tuesday. Zeldin, a four-term Republican congressman who lost the New York gubernatorial election in 2022, confirmed his selection in a post on X and stated a novel priority for the EPA to make the United States the “global leader” of artificial intelligence.
Vivek Chilukuri, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who has written critically on U.S. tech decoupling from China in Foreign Policy, observed: “It’s a strong signal the Trump administration will target existing environmental permitting for data centers and energy infrastructure as part of its strategy to boost American AI.”
Zeldin’s attention to data centers echoes Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, who argues that the next phase in AI competition will focus on where the data centers that power the technology will be built. In an October piece for Foreign Policy, Cohen wrote that the United States faces “significant bottlenecks” with building data centers—which in turn “presents an opportunity for governments and enterprises to practice data center diplomacy.”
Read it here: The Next AI Debate Is About Geopolitics
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The post Trump’s EPA Pick Cites AI as a Priority appeared first on Foreign Policy.
