June 18, 2026, 14:53 GMT | Insight
The construction of data centers that will power US leadership in artificial intelligence is turning out to be the key infrastructure bottleneck, the chief of the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in a policy speech. The NTIA is close to releasing "a comprehensive report" about regulatory red tape, the need for diverse energy sources, including coal, and supply chain issues. The push by the Trump administration comes amid a grassroots surge of opposition to data center construction.
Amid a surge of local opposition to AI data center construction, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is preparing a comprehensive report on how data centers can be built more quickly with less regulatory obstruction.
Arielle Roth, administrator of the NTIA, said in a policy speech Wednesday at an AI summit* in Washington, DC, that the goal of the Trump administration, after it brought together leaders from industry, utilities, and local governments last year to better understand the problems slowing data center construction, is to overcome overly complicated regulatory red tape, energy and supply chain bottlenecks.
“First, permitting remains a major obstacle,” Roth said of the results of the data center summit. “We heard repeatedly about projects navigating dozens of overlapping approval processes across multiple levels of government, conflicting requirements and timelines measuring years rather than months. Many of these rules were written decades ago and simply do not reflect modern AI infrastructure needs.”
Powering data centers is another problem, and Roth said the NTIA, a unit of the
US Department of Commerce, is working with the US
Department of Energy to develop new energy sources for them. That includes coal-powered generation, Roth said.
“Modern AI data centers require significant electricity, and in many cases it takes longer to bring new power generation online than to build the data center itself,” she said. “We need innovative approaches to matching data center demand with diverse energy sources.”
A third area the data center report will deal with involves supply chain issues.
“AI infrastructure depends on highly specialized equipment sourced through complex global supply chains,” Roth said in the policy speech. “We heard familiar concerns about dependencies of foreign suppliers for critical components and multi-year lead times, and the importance of reducing strategic dependencies for our long-term success.”
The push by the NTIA, that oversees Internet, AI and telecom policy for the executive branch, comes as states are increasingly abandoning policies aimed at attracting new data centers, as grassroots opposition to development builds across the US (see
here).
In Texas, Illinois, Utah and Pennsylvania, both Republican and Democratic governors who once touted the benefits of data centers are imposing new conditions on developers to protect water resources and local communities. In Maine, the state legislature passed a bill pausing the construction of new data centers, although it was vetoed by the state’s governor in April.
The Maine bill would have placed an 18-month moratorium on the construction of large data centers of 20 megawatts or more, and Governor Janet Mills said in her veto message that “a moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates.” But Mills said she didn’t want to derail a data center project in an economically depressed part of Maine that she said could produce 800 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs.
Maine state Representative Melanie Sachs, a Democrat who led the effort to pass the temporary data center ban, said at the same AI conference in Washington that over the past year, people unhappy about the boom in data center construction have started to speak up not only to state lawmakers, but to their local city and town leaders.
“What's changed is we are now having people in Maine at a local, select-board level, being asked about data centers. And that did not happen before,” Sachs said (see
here).
The NTIA is a logical place in the federal government to oversee and incentivize data center construction, said Matthew Plaster, a senior advisor for strategy at the agency. The current problem with local laws hampering data center construction would be like the
Federal Aviation Administration allowing different county laws to govern every commercial airline flight that went overhead.
“My airplane ride would be incredibly uncomfortable if they just had this insane patchwork” of regulation, Plaster said, adding that he’s not convinced there is a grassroots surge of opposition that state leaders describe.
“It's really hard to say where the opposition is coming from, to be perfectly honest,” Plaster said. “I mean, I've asked a number of members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, where is the opposition to the data centers coming from, and this is a little murky when you start to kind of look into it. I don't know if it is locally driven, or if it's other actors, perhaps, that have a very large interest in making sure that we don't have data centers in the United States.”
Roth said the data center report is likely to be out in the coming weeks. Speeding data center construction is critical, she said, because data centers, rather than networks, are “the primary infrastructure challenge for AI.”
“It's our ability to build, power, and operate the data centers that will enable the intelligence age,” she added.
That AI age has already begun, and the US must embrace it to assure it leads the world in developing a technology that will be critical to its economic prosperity.
“Every great technological transformation brings both optimism and uncertainty. AI is no different, and history teaches us that America succeeds when it approaches change with confidence rather than hesitation,” Roth said. “The question is whether we will do what is necessary to preserve and strengthen the American technological leadership that previous generations worked so hard to secure.”
*“The USA AI Summit 26,” presented by ForumGlobal, Washington, DC, June 17, 2026.
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