White House touts speeding up environmental reviews for data centers to support AI

The Biden administration is highlighting efforts to facilitate the development of frontier artificial intelligence in the United States, including by significantly reducing the time it takes to conduct environmental impact studies for permitting the energy- and water-intensive data centers associated with the technology.

“We have made some progress reducing environmental impact studies, the timeline, by six months on average,” said Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council. “What we're trying to do is develop a kind of...