Anthropic Says AI Needs a Whole Lot More Power—Stat

AI’s massive power consumption is making energy infrastructure a hot topic. In a new report, Anthropic says the US is seriously lagging China on new energy development and lays out what’s needed to maintain the country’s AI lead.

Training today’s largest AI models requires data centers that draw tens if not hundreds of megawatts of power at peak load. Anthropic predicts that by 2028, leading developers will require training clusters with up to five gigawatts of capacity.

With several companies competing to train the largest models, that could add up to around 25 gigawatts of new power requirements for training alone. Anthropic predicts that at least as much power will be needed to run finished models for customers, suggesting the US needs to deploy another 50 gigawatts of capacity in the next three years. And that’s on top of what is needed to meet already rising energy demands.

But getting new energy projects up and running in the US can be cumbersome, Anthropic says, which is putting the country at a major disadvantage compared to China, which deployed an eye-watering 400 gigawatts of new capacity last year. In a white paper titled, “Build AI in America,” the company outlines regulatory and policy changes it thinks are needed to support the domestic AI industry.

“For the United States to lead the world in AI, we must make substantial investments in computing power and electricity that make it possible to build AI in America,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The report outlines three key areas where the US is moving too slowly—building data centers themselves, building generation facilities, and building the transmission systems required to get electricity from one to the other. It also identifies the three biggest barriers holding these efforts back.

The first is the array of permits that developers need to secure before starting construction on any of these projects, in particular those pertaining to the environment. The second is transmission approvals that must be sought from the state public utility commissions before building new power lines, which can take years. And the third is the interconnection approvals from utilities that allow facilities to connect to the grid and can also take years for sign-off.

Anthropic proposes a two-stream solution. To speed the development of new AI infrastructure, the report suggests allowing data centers to be built on federal lands to avoid local zoning processes and streamlining environmental review of these projects.