In recent months, the Trump administration has opened a deregulatory floodgate in the name of building more data centers. Among other things, this has involved ordering rollbacks of clean water regulations and opening up public lands to coal mining.
Now, it’s turning its eye to chemical regulation with a new policy that could, experts say, potentially fast-track the approval of new chemicals for use in the US—including new types of forever chemicals—with limited oversight.
In September, the EPA announced it would be prioritizing the regulatory review of new chemicals used in data centers or related projects. The announcement is part of a sweeping set of overhauls pushed by the Trump administration following several executive orders related to AI and a White House AI Action Plan, both rolled out in July. The Action Plan was formed after soliciting more than 10,000 public comments, which included hundreds from industry interests. These actions, the White House has said, will usher in a “golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance.”
“I think they want to impose as few restrictions as possible on chemicals,” says Greg Schweer, who served as the EPA chief of the new chemicals management branch between 2008 and 2020. “In previous administrations, political people stayed out of [chemical regulation]—they tried to let science win. Here, the industry has a willing set of ears that wants to listen to their opinions.”
September’s announcement was part of a larger push to expedite new chemical reviews at the EPA. The new chemical review process underwent a significant reform in 2016; in the decade since, a backlog of chemical reviews has piled up at the agency, garnering complaints from industry and bipartisan criticism from lawmakers. Clearing out that backlog has been a priority of Trump’s second-term EPA. Helping to lead that charge at the agency are several former chemical industry executives, lobbyists, and lawyers.
“We inherited a massive backlog of new chemical reviews from the Biden Administration which is getting in the way of projects as it pertains to data center and artificial intelligence projects,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. “The Trump EPA wants to get out of the way and help speed up progress on these critical developments, as opposed to gumming up the works.”
As part of September’s announcement, the EPA created instructions for companies to submit documentation showing that the chemical for which they are seeking expedited review is part of a “qualifying project.” Companies must prove that the substance they want reviewed more quickly will be used in data centers or “covered component projects.” That includes projects that add at least 100 megawatts to the electric grid or projects that “[protect] national security,” as well as any projects deemed applicable by the secretary of defense, the secretary of the interior, the secretary of commerce, or the secretary of energy.
In an email responding to questions about the new program, the EPA said that chemicals that meet the criteria would simply be fast-tracked to the front of the line.
“No part of the new chemicals review process will be skipped or bypassed for chemicals that meet the criteria for data center or covered component projects,” agency press secretary Brigit Hirsch said in an email. “The new chemical review process will be the same for these chemicals as it is for all other new chemical submissions, upholding the same high level of scientific integrity and maintaining the same thresholds for risk determinations.”
But Schweer fears that the new policy could be used by chemical manufacturers to drive through new or existing chemicals with little oversight.
“There are some really big loopholes in here to get chemicals through,” Schweer says. “If you’ve got some friend at the Department of Defense or the Department of Commerce, all you have to do is get that person to send a letter saying, ‘This is a qualifying project.’ There’s no proof involved.”
Political pressure to get a chemical approved, Schweer alleges, could also lead to sloppiness on the part of agency reviewers. “If you have to do things quickly, you look for shortcuts, and you don’t always have time to look at all the data very well.”
Experts tell WIRED that physical data centers themselves are unlikely to be a major source of chemical applications under this new policy. Walter Leclerc, an independent health and safety consultant to the data center industry, points out that many of the chemicals currently used in data centers are already used in a variety of other industries. Most of those chemicals, including lubricants, fire suppressants, and water treatment chemicals, are not specific to data centers—they “are no different from [what’s used in] Suzie and John’s industrial business.” he says.
But there is one area of data center development where newer chemicals might be game changers. Keeping the equipment inside data centers cool is a huge component of their operating costs. One technique that can help cut these costs, called immersion cooling, involves dunking server racks and other machinery in a special liquid that does not conduct electricity. A subtype of immersion cooling, known as two-phase immersion cooling, takes this one step further. The liquid boils off into gas that then hits a coil, turns back into a liquid, and drips back into the tank.
These cooling techniques can reduce the need for fans, pumps, and other equipment, and can save data centers a lot of money in the long run on their electricity bills. The market for specialty cooling liquids for data centers has skyrocketed in recent years, with big names like Exxon and Shell getting into the game.
“Immersion cooling is the best,” Leclerc says. “The problem is it’s got all the environmental effects.”
Some of the substances used in two-phase immersion cooling largely contain fluorine and carbon, which help create types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS). Colloquially called “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in the environment, some of these chemicals have been linked to a wide variety of human health problems, from increased risk of cancer and reproductive issues to suppressed immune response. They have also been subject to increased regulation in recent years, with the EU proposing working towards what could be a particularly strict ban on PFAS. Several US states are also moving to restrict or eliminate the chemicals. (While the Trump administration has said that PFAS regulation is a priority, it has begun to roll back some Biden-era rules on some of these chemicals.)
Some bigger companies seem well aware of the risks of using forever chemicals in their cooling systems—especially following legal battles and settlements that have hurt PFAS producers like 3M, which has pledged to discontinue manufacturing and using PFAS this year. A study released in April, coauthored by Microsoft researchers, on the environmental life cycles of data center cooling techniques noted that “emerging PFAS regulations in the European Union and the United States” could “restrict” the use of two-phase immersion cooling.
While Microsoft has touted its research into two-phase cooling in the past, including a hyped-up pilot project at a data center in Washington, Microsoft spokesperson Donna Whitehead told WIRED that the company “is not currently using immersion cooling technologies in [its] data center operations.” Companies like Exxon and Shell, meanwhile, take care to advertise their cooling liquids—which are not used in two-phase cooling—as “PFAS-free.”
But at least one chemical giant—Chemours—has introduced new products for use in two-phase immersion in recent years. After developing a line of products that uses fluids containing fluoride, hydrogen, and carbon, which can be types of PFAS, Chemours collaborated with Samsung to test one liquid’s performance earlier this year. In August the Delaware-based company said that “testing for subsequent generations will begin in the months ahead.” (While the chemical compounds being used in these products have not been linked to specific health effects, some scientists are concerned about forever chemicals as a larger class.) Chemours has emphasized in its sustainability reports that these fluids could help reduce the energy needed to cool data centers by up to 90 percent.
In public comments it submitted on the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, Chemours encouraged reforms to the new chemicals program in order to allow the country to “swiftly adopt new technologies that can drive [the US’s] competitiveness globally.” According to a press release from 2023, the company’s two-phase cooling liquids were originally targeted to be introduced to the market this year, “pending appropriate regulatory approvals.”
Chemours, which spun off from multinational chemical company DuPont in 2015, has agreed to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of settlements related to PFAS pollution in recent years. The company, along with DuPont and other chemical companies, still faces a number of multinational lawsuits from cities, counties, and states over pollution from PFAS production.
In response to questions on its two-phase cooling products from WIRED, including whether or not the company planned to submit chemicals for fast-tracked consideration under the administration’s new data center exemption, Chemours spokesperson Cassie Olszewski said the company is “in the process of commercializing our two-phase immersion cooling fluid, which will require relevant regulatory approvals.”
“Our work in this area has been focused on developing more sustainable and efficient cooling solutions that would allow data centers to consume less energy, water, and footprint while effectively managing the increasing amount of heat generated by the next generation of chips with higher processing power,” Olszewski said.
These chips could also be a significant source of new chemicals. Both Schweer and Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a lawyer at environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, say that the semiconductor industry, which produces the chips that provide the computing power in data centers, stands to gain significantly from the expedited review process. The semiconductor manufacturing process uses forever chemicals at multiple different points of production, including in the crucial photolithography process, which uses light to transfer patterns to the surface of silicon wafers.
Schweer says that in his last few years working at the EPA, this industry submitted a large number of applications for new chemicals. Kalmuss-Katz says that semiconductor manufacturers “are a main driver of new chemicals.”
“The administration has this kind of AI-at-all-costs mindset, where you’re rushing to build more and more data centers and chip fabs without any meaningful plan for dealing with their climate impacts, their natural resource impacts, and the toxic substances that are being used and released from these new facilities,” he says.
Lobbying documents show that the semiconductor industry has been asking for changes this year to the EPA’s new-chemicals program. In March, Nancy Beck, a former policy director for an industry lobbyist group who now leads the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, the office that oversees new chemical reviews, met with representatives from SEMI, a global advocacy organization for the industry. The meeting was initially organized to discuss the “EPA’s approach to regulations on PFAS and other chemicals that are essential to semiconductor manufacturing,” according to emails obtained by WIRED via a Freedom of Information Act request. Emails show that Beck suggested during the meeting that the lobbying group follow up with a public comment in support of changes to the new chemicals program, which the group sent over the next month in a letter. (“The Trump EPA encourages stakeholders to submit and document their comments on proposed rules so that we get a diverse array of perspectives,” says Hirsch, the EPA spokesperson.)
“Making the United States the global capital of artificial intelligence (Al) … will depend on the country’s ability to significantly expand domestic production of semiconductors and reshore large portions of the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain,” the letter from SEMI to Beck reads. “This can only be realized through a regulatory approach that effectively balances risk-based controls with ensuring access to chemicals that are vital to the production of semiconductors.” (SEMI declined to comment for this article.)
Companies don’t have to develop data centers directly—or even components that go into data centers, like semiconductors—to benefit from the EPA’s new policy. Both this summer’s AI executive orders and the EPA’s new policy open the door to fast-track chemicals far beyond those used only, or even primarily, within data centers. This, experts tell WIRED, could enable a wide variety of companies to try and get approval for their new products by linking them to data center construction.
“If [a company has] planned a data center, they’re not gonna be waiting around for a new chemical to be approved by the agency,” Schweer says. “They should have everything they need ready to go. That doesn’t mean that somebody won’t use [the new policy] as an excuse to try to get some chemical through.”
Both Leclerc, the data center specialist, and Schweer support reforms to the new chemical review program and clearing the backlog of chemical reviews from the agency. But they both expressed concerns about the new data center policy.
Making it quicker and easier for chemicals to go through the EPA is “a pro-growth move,” Leclerc says. “But there’s definitely long-term safety implications.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
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