Expanding the electric grid to help the U.S. win the artificial intelligence race is a “national imperative” — one that requires buy-in from elected officials and regulators at all levels of government, said Bob Frenzel, CEO of Xcel Energy, one of the nation’s largest utilities.
“In a vacuum, nobody can do this by themselves,” Frenzel said on Friday at an economic conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “We all need to hold hands and lean in and say, this is something that we need to do.”
The CEO, who oversees a utility holding company with operations in eight states, sees AI as an economic engine, transformative on the scale that availability of electricity was a century ago. But rapid-scale data center development also brings labor and supply chain bottlenecks that can have consequences.
In a conversation with Neel Kashkari, CEO of the Minneapolis Fed, Frenzel was largely optimistic about AI’s impact and took on growing criticism of data center energy consumption as a force driving electricity bills higher.
