Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of sweeping AI policy recommendations to “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing.” Among the suggested environmental rollbacks laid out in both an executive order and a corresponding AI Action Plan is a set of specific recommendations to essentially loosen Clean Water Act permitting processes for data centers. They mirror suggestions made to regulators earlier this year by both a major data center lobbying group and Meta.

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