The rapid growth of AI is creating a data center boom. Across the country, big tech is building

massive facilities for their cutting edge AI infrastructure. But half century old environmental

protections are slowing that. Wired magazine has found that big tech companies are asking the

White House to ease those protections and that the Trump

administration appears to be all in. Allie Rogan spoke with Molly Taft, a senior reporter at Wired.

Thank you so much for joining us. So what regulatory protections are these AI companies seeking to

roll back? There's a lot of environmental asks. But one specific

protection that caught my eye was a very specific ask around a section of the Clean Water Act,

which is known as a 404 permit, which is named after the section of the Clean Water Act, it refers to.

So if you're building anything that will impact a federally protected

waterway, if you're building a road across a wetland, if you're building a building that nudges up

into a protected stream, if you're altering the course of a river, you're going to need a permit.

It can be a pretty cumbersome process. It can be expensive and add a couple years onto a project.

What the federal government has done is said there's a set of activities that we will just say,

okay, you don't need to go through this cumbersome permitting process. You can just get a blanket

permit. And what the tech industry is asking for is for data

centers to be included in this list. This was a specific ask from META and the Data Center Coalition,

which is the industry's largest lobbying arm includes members like Amazon, Google, Meta as well.

And so these are the companies that are asking for

this very specific permission under the Clean Water Act. And what would this permission get them?

It would basically just enable them to speed up construction of data centers. That's been

kind of their ask, you know, we're in sort of an interesting political moment

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