The president Donald Trump stated this Wednesday that United States leads the global race in artificial intelligence due to its decision to allow major tech companies to build their own power generation plants to supply their data centers.
We lead in artificial intelligence thanks to me. We lead. Do you know why? I’m allowing you to build your own power plants. You are becoming a utility company," Trump stated in remarks released by the official Rapid Response 47 account.
The leader personally claimed the initiative and explicitly mentioned the founder of Meta: "I told Mark Zuckerberg: congratulations, you are in the electricity business. Because if I hadn't done that, it was my idea, really."
Trump explained the logic behind the measure: if artificial intelligence companies had relied on the existing power grid, it wouldn't have been able to support the demand. "They are building these massive plants. And if they were to take energy from the grid, the grid couldn't handle it. I said: no, if they want to build it, they have to generate their own energy. And then they will return the excess energy to our grid. And all these things are currently under construction," he stated.
The president also took the opportunity to reiterate his stance on the competition with Peking: "We are surpassing China in this. We are surpassing China in the economy. We have a great economy."
These statements are part of a strategy that the Trump administration has developed since the beginning of its second term to link energy supremacy with technological leadership against China. The starting point was the acknowledgment that next-generation artificial intelligence data centers require clusters of between two and five gigawatts each, a demand that the aging U.S. power grid cannot accommodate.
In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order that streamlined federal permits for data centers requiring over 100 megawatts of new electrical load, reducing approval timelines from years to weeks.
In March 2026, the White House summoned Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI to sign the "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," a voluntary commitment by which these companies agree to bear all energy costs of their data centers without passing them on to residential consumers.
Meta is the most emblematic case of this strategy. The company signed in January 2026 , including purchases from Vistra Corp. and support for modular reactors from Oklo and TerraPower. Its key projects are "Prometheus," a one-gigawatt data center in Ohio slated for this year, and "Hyperion," of up to five gigawatts in Louisiana, scheduled for 2028. The company projected spending more than $100 billion annually on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2026.
The administration also aims to expand the nuclear capacity of the U.S. from approximately 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts by 2050, with three experimental reactors expected to be operational by July fourth of this year.
In January 2026, during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump had already anticipated this message: "leading the world in artificial intelligence by a large margin, significantly outpacing China." An official from his administration summarized the stakes with a phrase that defines the strategic vision behind all these measures: "What we do in the next five years regarding electricity will determine the next 50, because this is the first time in history that electricity can be translated into intelligence."
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