The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is innovating artificial intelligence (AI) in a way that both lessens environmental impact and makes the agency’s work more efficient, with Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi saying “the United States must win” the international AI race.
Fotouhi joined Breitbart News economics editor John Carney for a sit-down interview during the outlet’s Monday policy event in Washington, DC, highlighting the EPA’s commitment to helping President Donald Trump advance the country’s AI dominance.
“It’s sort of an inward and outward look,” he said of the agency’s work with AI. “So externally, we all know that data centers that will power the AI revolution — that the President’s been very clear that the United States must win, it’s not optional –- require significant base load power and significant amounts of water.”
Trump released the 23-page “America’s AI Action Plan” in July, saying it is “a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” while its “global competitors race to exploit these technologies.”
“AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today,” the White House report states. “American energy capacity has stagnated since the 1970s, while China has rapidly built out their grid. America’s path to AI dominance depends on changing this troubling trend.”
A recent report from the Center for Security Policy claims that AI technology is the 21st century’s “cold war,” warning that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “on the cusp of becoming the world’s dominant AI superpower.”
“If the Communist Party of China dominates the hardware and software of Artificial Intelligence, as it officially plans to do by 2030, it will succeed in relegating the United States to a second-rate power and worse,” the report argues.
Fotouhi continued on to share some details of the EPA’s work to build more infrastructure for AI.
“So, through our regulatory actions, we’re looking for ways to improve the ability for the electric power generating sector, to invest in base load power, and improve grid reliability,” the deputy administrator said, before emphasizing the environmental aspect as well.
“We’re also looking for ways where there can be opportunities for water reuse, so that facilities that are using large amounts of water for cooling have opportunities to reuse existing water streams without necessarily having to deplete groundwater sources,” he explained. “So we’re working on an update to our water reuse action plan to provide that type of flexibility in that regard.”
On the internal side, Fotouhi said the EPA understands that harnessing AI “can help improve how the agency processes large amounts of information, how we go about our permitting — and so we’re doing that in a very careful way.”
“We’re not just sort of rolling anything out before we’ve proven the concept, but we are looking for opportunities, and we’re working with our state partners,” he said, before noting that some states and their environmental departments are ahead of the federal government in using AI internally.
According to Fotouhi, the technology can “sort of be a force multiplier for the staff that we have working every day.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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