Venture capitalist David Sacks once warned that Washington’s go-slow approach to artificial intelligence could strangle the industry.
“The vibe is that a bunch of people in Washington don’t understand technology and they’re afraid of it,” he said on a 2023 episode of his podcast, “All In.” “So anything you’re afraid of, you’re going to want to control.”
President Donald Trump’s first executive order on AI revoked safety guardrails put in place by his predecessor that could get in the way of “America’s global AI dominance.” Today, as the president’s AI and crypto czar, Sacks is tasked with opening doors for Silicon Valley and global financiers to expand AI infrastructure — and fast.
But that presents Sacks with a wholly unfamiliar challenge: ensuring the tech industry gets the electricity it needs for a massive buildout of data centers to house the computing power needed for AI technology.
Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and their partners have each pledged to spend between $60 billion and over $100 billion on AI infrastructure — in 2025 alone. Data centers on their drawing boards are bigger by square-footage than the biggest human-made structures on Earth.
The day after Trump’s inauguration, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son stood side-by-side with Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. They announced a four-year, $500 billion “Stargate” project to build data centers. The presentation stood as proof that an energy-intensive, maximalist approach is the American plan for beating China in the race for AI dominance.
It’s the approach Altman is selling to bankers. It’s the one that Trump is clearly buying and that Sacks has staked his close relationship with the president on achieving.
“I don’t think we can separate Trump’s policy of AI boosterism from his policy of energy dominance,” said Kate Brennan, associate director of the New York-based AI Now Institute, which studies the social implications of the coming AI boom.
Trump has promised to use emergency declarations to build more power plants. But tech companies that want to erect their own power plants will wrestle with the limited supply of ready transformers and the real-world challenges of putting up a large gas-fired power station or tying into a nuclear reactor.
Regional electric grids and utilities that serve millions of Americans are straining to keep up with demands for more power. Prospects of doubling or tripling annual electricity demand growth are leading to fights over rising electricity costs in places like Pennsylvania. And it puts the tech industry on a collision course with state utility regulators charged with ensuring economic growth doesn’t drive up energy costs for households.
Trump’s AI executive order, which sets some guidance for Sacks’ role, does not detail how any of those problems would be addressed. In his first public appearance with members of Congress, Sacks focused on policy for cryptocurrency.
But in the immediate aftermath of a panic among tech investors when the Chinese company DeepSeek unveiled a more efficient AI model, Sacks talked up the plan to go big on a U.S. data center buildout.
“If we scale the biggest data centers, it is still an advantage,” Sacks told Fox News last month, noting that he would work with Trump to make them easier to power.
Trump hasn’t rescinded a separate executive order issued in the final days of the Biden administration that opened federal lands to data centers that are paired with lower-carbon energy. And Trump’s leaders at EPA and the Department of Energy have said they will use their position to help clear obstacles to electrifying power centers.
Tech enthusiasts say they’re looking to a familiar ally like Sacks as the industry grapples with environmental permitting and grid interconnection.
Chris Koopman, executive director of the Abundance Institute, based in Salt Lake City, said he expects Sacks to frame his energy arguments around American competitiveness and use whatever levers he can to shape policy.
“Sacks can point directly to his portfolio of AI work and investments and say: ‘This is the next Industrial Revolution,’” said Koopman, who promotes tech growth and energy expansion. “If we can’t fuel it, we’ll lose it. And David Sacks can set national energy policy towards a specific goal, which is this new Industrial Revolution.”
‘PayPal Mafia’
Sacks is a tech-optimist, a 52-year-old billionaire investor with a libertarian faith that technology and business can solve the world’s most vexing problems — including climate change.
He is part of the “PayPal Mafia” — the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who created the money-transfer system PayPal in the late 1990s. The group of young technologists included Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Today, all three are pouring billions of dollars into AI as they help shape Trump’s views on government regulation of the technology.
Sacks, who was born in South Africa, founded genealogy website Geni.com and co-founded Yammer, a social network software company bought by Microsoft in 2012.
In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an investment firm with stakes in several AI-focused companies. Last spring, Sacks announced a partnership with tech entrepreneur Evan Owen to launch Glue, an AI-fueled employee chat app similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Although Sacks in the past has given to candidates of both parties, he lined up fully behind Trump last year alongside other Silicon Valley mavens. He hosted a fundraiser for Trump in June, and he spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The White House did not make Sacks available for an interview and did not answer specific questions about Sacks’ role today. Craft Ventures did not return a request for comment.
Sacks’ job at the White House is under a special category that isn’t full-time employment with the government and may not require him to stop investing in AI startups.
Also unclear is how much influence Sacks will have over the direction of energy policy, or the extent to which environmental impacts will factor in. Burning a lot more gas or keeping coal plants open to meet power demand would reverse progress on cutting carbon emissions to address climate change.
On his podcast All In, which he hosts with three other venture capitalists, Sacks has said climate change should be addressed only through new technology, such as systems that can capture and store emissions, rather than by reducing economic activity.
“I’m not an expert in that area. I’m not going to pretend to be,” Sacks said in a 2022 episode. “I do think we can’t save the planet by destroying the economy. And it seems to me that too many of these ‘save the planet’ people want to take reckless, extreme actions that would wreck our economy.”
In other episodes, Sacks criticized climate policies lumped under the catch-all Green New Deal. In a 2021 episode of the show, Sacks and co-host David Friedberg sniffed at the notion that climate change is “just something you’re supposed to believe in.”
“The institutions, the elites, however they’re framed, have been wrong so many times on the things that they told us were given,” said Friedberg. “That we’re supposed to believe this is a given too — Eff that!”
“Exactly,” Sacks said.
AI plan
Sacks is part of a wave of Big Tech executives joining the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk. Koopman of the Abundance Institute said those individuals are likely to push policies that would streamline data center construction.
“These are people who aren’t willing to accept unrealistic timelines or the idea that it could take years or decades to accomplish things,” Koopman said. “They’re bringing a mentality of scaling fast, building fast, iterating quickly and not accepting failure.”
The frustrations that can slow down projects, however, are seen by many on the left as necessary tools to avoid environmental or societal damage.
Alondra Nelson, a science adviser under Biden who led the development of the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” said she was concerned to see Trump revoke Biden-era AI guidance without a new plan in place.
“When the executive order says we have 180 days to write a strategy, that’s a little surprising because that puts us 180 days away from an action,” said Nelson, now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Nelson said that even though climate and energy were not explicitly part of the Biden team’s directive, the issue permeated all aspects of the administration’s science work. Climate investments through the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, helped fund clean energy investments for data centers. She encouraged the Trump administration to have a similar approach to balancing clean energy with AI.
“My hope would be that [they] appreciate that it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, that we either have to exhaust all of our sources of energy or build in a way that’s not harmful,” Nelson said. “How do we do it in a way that’s cleaner, that’s more efficient?”
That seems unlikely. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring an “energy emergency” and ordering the government to “eliminate harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies.” That order also called for more energy supply to fuel a “high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology.”
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, Trump reiterated his promise to use emergency authority to get more power for data centers, including those that aren’t connected to the larger grid.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup,” Trump said. “Good, clean coal.”
Under Trump’s executive order, Sacks will work alongside policy staffers on science and technology, national security, economic policy and other relevant departments to craft an AI action plan, although it does not mention energy as a topic. Some direction could come from Trump’s National Energy Council, set to be led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. That council is likely to consider steps to streamline permitting and to unleash more fossil fuel production.
Sacks will also co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Under Biden, a 27-member council worked on AI issues, especially noting the opportunity of advanced intelligence to solve complex scientific problems.
The climate implications of data centers came up “late in the process,” said Stephen Pacala, a biology professor at Princeton University and a member of the council under Biden, in an interview.
Under Biden, the council also included executives from Microsoft, 3M, chip-maker Nvidia and computer hardware company Advanced Micro Devices. Trump has not yet named the members of his council.
Other science advisers to Trump include Michael Kratsios, the former White House chief technology officer during Trump’s first term who has been nominated to lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lynne Parker, a roboticist and founding director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office in 2021, will serve as executive director of the council of advisers.
Brennan of the AI Now Institute said that a fast-charging approach to artificial intelligence that does not consider the climate implications poses risks to the industry.
“There’s not enough renewable energy right now, and we could see big tech companies abandon their climate commitments,” Brennan said. “We’re seeing fossil fuel plants stay online, which means the immediate and tangible harms of a rapid tech expansion are hitting communities and people.”
