Tag: oil

Article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Right-wing political group Americans for Prosperity, backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, sees data centers as part of a larger pro-fossil fuel agenda.

A political group created by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch earlier this year wrote to a branch of the U.S. government making requests about artificial intelligence.

“To seize the moment and ensure that AI can meet its true promise and potential,” it argued in March to the National Coordination Office, a federal body tasked by Donald Trump at the time with developing an AI Action Plan, the administration should “clear the red tape” preventing “energy innovators” from supplying the massive amounts of electricity required to power new AI data centers across the country.

The comments were written by analysts with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a Koch-bankrolled activist organization that supports right-wing causes and political candidates and spent more than $157 million to sway voters during the 2024 elections.

Strategy plans, policy documents, corporate communications and comments to the federal government reviewed by DeSmog show that Koch’s political operation is attempting to shape and help implement a U.S. AI technology agenda, which could ultimately profit Koch’s traditional oil and gas business.

Despite the Koch network’s ongoing disagreements with Trump on issues including tariffs, the vast political operation appears to have found common cause with the administration on ensuring that fossil fuels, and not renewable energy sources, are central to AI development, even as wind and solar remain cheaper and faster to build.

“Practical solutions can be identified that move our nation forward,” Americans for Prosperity wrote to the government’s AI and Energy Working Group in May. “We look forward to working with you and the Congress to assist in the identification of those solutions.”

Neither AFP nor Koch, Inc. responded to a request for comment.

‘Couched in Fear’

Charles Koch became one of America’s richest people through owning and overseeing an industrial empire with his late brother, David, that includes oil refineries, pipelines, petrochemicals and natural gas. Koch, Inc., formerly known as Koch Industries, is now embracing AI across its vast operations, which it has predicted will create “substantial economic value” for the company.

Koch, Inc., in 2020 announced a partnership with the AI software provider C3 AI, with the goal of improving “operating performance” across its products “ranging from refined oil, chemicals, and biofuels to polymers, automotive components, and forest products.”

Also around that time, the company led a $125 million investment in the San Francisco cloud computing startup Mesosphere, alongside the likes of Microsoft and Khosla Ventures. Other backers included Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm whose founders became prominent Trump supporters during the 2024 election.

Koch, Inc., said in October that its real estate arm has been getting into the business of building data centers in cities like Chicago, Kansas City, and Atlanta. The company argued in a news release that it “can provide the expertise and capabilities that major tech companies either don’t have or don’t think would be worth the time or effort to build on their own from the ground up.”

As Koch’s industrial empire invests in AI and partners with Big Tech, AFP is pushing the Trump administration to remove regulatory barriers on the technology.

Last March, AFP analysts Faith Burns and James Czerniawski disapprovingly noted there were over 800 state-level proposals to regulate AI. These efforts “are couched in fear of the technology,” they argued in comments to the National Coordination Office, and said the correct approach for government is “keeping itself out of the way to drive innovation.”

This is part of a larger political project that would also be beneficial to the Koch companies involved with producing, transporting and selling fossil fuels.

AFP argued in its March comments that the administration and Congress could make progress on accelerating AI by deregulating the power sector “to get abundant and affordable energy to Americans and leading AI companies.” 

‘Radical Climate Dogma’ 

The quickest and most economic way to power all the data centers now being built is through renewable sources, industry data shows. That’s in part because nearly 80 percent of planned electricity projects in the U.S. are currently tied to solar and wind farms.

But Americans for Prosperity has thrown its political weight behind legislation that hobbles renewables in favor of oil, gas and coal.

It cited as a major victory the passage this summer of the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill, a massive tax cut bill predominately benefiting America’s wealthiest citizens that included deep cuts to clean energy tax credits brought in under President Joe Biden.

The Koch political group ran a $20 million advertising and political campaign that it claimed “helped make this win possible through over 1,500 meetings with lawmakers, nearly 500,000 doors knocked, more than 475,000 phone calls, 725+ community events [and] over 100,000 letters sent to Congress.”

AFP presented the bill as a victory for fossil fuels. “It provides for a minimum of 30 offshore oil and gas lease sales,” its analyst Burns said in an advertisement posted on the group’s Facebook page. “And it makes available for lease four million acres of recoverable coal resources on federal land.”

As it worked to help pass the Big Beautiful Bill, Americans for Prosperity was supporting the administration’s efforts on AI.

In late July, the Trump administration unveiled an AI Action Plan, which promised “to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape” to ensure that the U.S. can “build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it.”

In a statement that was posted on the White House website, Americans for Prosperity’s Brent Gardner said the plan “will ensure America leads the world” on AI. That statement was included along with praise from the likes of Chevron, Palantir, Meta, IBM and the Heritage Foundation. 

The plan itself had input from Dean Ball, who was recently an AI advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and earlier a fellow at the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank that’s received millions of dollars in funding from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Ball was “intimately involved in the drafting” of the plan, according to a recent webinar on AI policy hosted by National Journal.

Ball said during the event that the build-out of data centers will likely mean that there’s “more gas, natural gas in particular, used in the United States than there otherwise might have been.”

Ball is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a national non-profit whose supporters include the Koch-backed Stand Together Trust.

The Next AI Battle

The fallout of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is already being felt across the renewables industry. Power “developers have canceled 1,891 power projects this year with a combined capacity of 266 GW, with clean energy accounting for 93% of cancellations,” according to analysis by the climate newsletter Distilled.

That’s not necessarily good news for AI, given that new natural gas and nuclear facilities can  take much longer to build than renewables.

And there is now a growing backlash to the technology, with a coalition of over 200 environmental groups this month demanding a halt to new U.S. data centers, arguing they are “rapidly increasing demand for energy, driving more fossil fuel pollution, straining water resources and raising electricity prices across the country.”

But Americans for Prosperity has now made one of its political priorities getting federal “permitting reform” legislation passed, which would streamline or eliminate many environmental and other reviews on new energy projects such as data centers.

In a recent petition form sent out to its members, AFP claimed that permitting reform can help “ensure 24/7 reliable power as demand increases, particularly in regions experiencing surging data center growth and electrification trends.” It envisions such legislation as hastening “new pipelines, export terminals and delivery systems” along with expanding “LNG and crude oil exports.”

The Koch network is joined by a coalition of fossil fuel industry groups including the American Petroleum Institute and the American Gas Association, which in early December released a letter calling for passage of “a broader permitting package” around new energy infrastructure projects.

And the effort is also attracting interest from Big Tech.

Sponsors for a mid-December conference in Washington, D.C., that includes U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and features panels on “permitting reform,” “energy for AI,” and “American energy dominance” include the Koch nonprofit organization Stand Together.

Also listed as a sponsor: the tech giant Amazon.

Article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.