United States wants to win the AI race with affordable, reliable energy plus capital investments
Lorenzo Totaro
Senior Contributor, Europe
Sep 10, 2025
The United States is positioning its energy policy as the primary weapon in a global “AI arms race,” 55th US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said, speaking at a joint briefing with Secretary Chris Wright, 17th US Secretary of Energy, on the sidelines of Gastech 2025 in Milan.
“One of the other principles of the US energy policy is to win the AI arms race, and we can only win that when we've got affordable, reliable energy,” Secretary Burgum said. “All of the capital investment, the massive amounts, the trillions of dollars of investment are going to flow to places that have low energy and low electricity prices.”
Secretary Burgum called the computational power required for AI the “highest form of use of electricity in human history.” He added that “never before in human history have, we been able to turn a kilowatt hour of electricity into an intelligence.”
“One of the other principles of the US energy policy is to win the AI arms race, and we can only win that when we've got affordable, reliable energy.”
— United States Secretary of Energy Chris Wright
This reality demands a fundamental shift in thinking about energy production, he concluded. “It’s not about an energy transition. It’s about energy addition. We need more reliable, affordable energy. That’s the strategy.”
The administration's goal is to increase the total energy supply to ensure the U.S. remains the most attractive location for the massive data centers and chip factories that will define the next technological era.
“We're for energy, any energy that's affordable, reliable, and secure,” said Secretary Wright. “But we've seen a lot of money, in fact the biggest investment in any energy source in the world, in the last 10 years has been in wind, solar, and batteries -- together, they don't quite make up 3% of global energy.” He said that the incentives “produced a relatively small amount of energy.”
“Solar has a future, and we want to see where that goes,” the Energy Secretary added. “But in the United States, we've decided enough is enough. Thirty-three years of subsidising wind and solar, we're going to stop that and let them compete as energy technologies in the marketplace.”
