US energy chief exhorts data center backers to push back against opponents

WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Tuesday urged supporters of data centers at an Amazon Web Services conference to push back against critics, saying concerns about the facilities are “overblown.”

Wright listed concerns that opponents have raised about the boom in the facilities including water and power use and that the artificial intelligence they support will take away jobs and harm communities.

“These are the things that everyone is saying and right now in the polls, they are winning,” he said.

Wright, a former CEO of oilfield service company Liberty Energy, likened the issue to opposition he faced over the drilling technique for oil and gas known as fracking. “They cannot win and they will not win,” Wright said.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month showed that only one in three Americans approve of the fast pace of data center construction, an issue on the minds of voters and political campaigns ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.

Data center opponents are raising real issues including that artificial intelligence could enable “some bad things,” Wright said, without elaborating. It is not that the issues are unreal, “they’re just overblown.” He urged supporters to speak with skeptical neighbors. “You should be over-the-top proud of what you’re doing … share a little bit of that pride and those facts with everyone around you.”

“We’ll roll over the opposition to data centers faster than we otherwise should,” he said.

Data centers have also become a heated issue among investors. Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor and television personality, recently walked back comments that opponents to his planned 40,000-acre data center in Utah were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party, saying he had “no evidence.” O’Leary has agreed to scale back the project to protect wildlife.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)