{"text":[[{"start":6.2,"text":"The writer is a partner at venture capital firm CIV. He was previously special assistant to President Joe Biden for economic policy"}],[{"start":15.05,"text":"The data centre provisions in the US Senate permitting bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), are a Rorschach test. Some consider them harsh while others regard the bill as a giveaway to data centres. "}],[{"start":29.450000000000003,"text":"Here are the facts: the bill would charge data centres both for their use of existing transmission infrastructure and for incremental costs to serve them, and ensure data centres do not pass their energy costs on to other customers. It would also allow states to overcharge them for energy and pass that revenue on to other customers in the form of savings. The bill recognises an important truth: it is in the US’s long-term economic and national security interest to build data centres — but only on terms that ensure benefits for and buy-in from the communities that host them. "}],[{"start":62.85,"text":"The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and other recent laws have sought to revitalise US manufacturing in critical technologies, reduce supply-chain risks and create American jobs with a mix of grants and tax credits for technologies such as batteries, solar panels and EVs. They’ve been successful in many areas, although these investments had to fight the laws of economic gravity (and Beijing’s industrial policy). American-made solar modules cost three times as much as China’s before federal incentives, and American batteries are roughly 45 per cent more expensive. More broadly, efforts to deploy clean energy technology must contend with the fact that, in the absence of new demand, they compete not with the cost of new fossil fuel generation but with building nothing at all — waiting until existing plants are retired."}],[{"start":110.65,"text":"Data centres, by contrast, have economic gravity on their side. Most analysts forecast trillions in US AI capex in the coming years. In 2025, data centres represented 72 per cent of corporate clean energy power purchase agreements in the Americas. The BAAJA is premised, correctly, on the assumption that data centre developers can afford to pay for their own energy. That would remain true if most of that energy were clean. An approach that expands on the IRA’s would have far greater impact because it would ride the tailwinds of pre-existing demand."}],[{"start":146.45,"text":"The same is true of jobs and manufacturing. New research I led at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research has found that at today’s levels, data centre construction supports more than 300,000 upstream US manufacturing jobs making critical equipment like transformers and networking systems. This number would rise further if the share of this equipment produced domestically rose as a result of tax credits for domestically made components or tariffs on imported ones."}],[{"start":175.7,"text":"It would be easy for politicians sensitive to popular disquiet about data centres to ignore these benefits. But that would be a mistake. Building data centres in America puts them within the jurisdiction of US policymakers who can use industrial policy to advance the interests of American companies and workers or promote clean energy. "}],[{"start":196.2,"text":"There are also important geopolitical arguments for doing so. America’s advantage over China in advanced compute is a crucial one. It could become vital leverage in the effort to bring Beijing to the table on AI safety. Some contend that vying with China for AI supremacy is dangerous, risking agentic cyber attacks or bioengineered viral pandemics. I share these concerns, but they have little to do with whether we should build data centres. It would be like trying to reduce traffic fatalities by shutting down car factories rather than enacting vehicle and highway safety rules."}],[{"start":229.7,"text":"The US currently holds the advantage with data centres, the physical enabling layer for a technology that will be at the centre of the 21st-century economy. The question is whether we turn away from this growth engine or seek a social compact that allows us to harness it for the benefit of the country and its citizens. The permitting bill, the product of an ongoing democratic process, is a first step towards that goal."}],[{"start":260.45,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792303026_6455.mp3"}