JOHN YANG: The rapid growth of AI is creating a data center boom.

Across the country big tech is building massive facilities for their cutting edge AI infrastructure.

But half century old environmental protections are slowing that.

WIRED magazine has found that big tech companies are asking the White House to ease those protections and that the Trump administration appears to be all in.

Ali Rogin spoke with Molly Taft, a senior reporter at Wired.

ALI ROGIN: Thank you so much for joining us.

So what regulatory protections are these AI companies seeking to roll back?

MOLLY TAFT, Senior Reporter, WIRED: There's a lot of environmental asks, but one specific protection that caught my eye was a very specific ask around a section of the Clean Water Act, which is known as a 404 permit, which is named after the section of the Clean Water act it refers to.

So, if you're building anything that will impact a federally protected waterway, if you're building a road across a wetland, if you're building a building that nudges up into a protected stream, if you're altering the course of a river, you're going to need a permit.

It can be a pretty cumbersome process, can be expensive and add a couple years onto a project.

What the federal government has done is said there's a set of activities that we will just say, okay, you don't need to go through this cumbersome permitting process.

You can just get a blanket permit.

And what the tech industry is asking for is for data centers to be included in this list.

This was a specific ask from Meta and the Data Center Coalition, which is the industry's largest lobbying arm, includes members like Amazon, Google, Meta as well.

And so these are the companies that are asking for this very specific permission under the Clean Water Act.

ALI ROGIN: And what would this permission get them?

MOLLY TAFT: It would basically just enable them to speed up construction of data centers.

That's been kind of their ask, you know, we're in sort of an interesting political moment right now where across the aisle there's this sense that, you know, one of the reasons we haven't been able to build so much is because we have a lot of environmental regulations that hold up projects that, you know, don't speed them forward.

And so this section of the Clean Water Act has kind of long been a complaint from, you know, the construction industry, from the oil and gas industry.

This is kind of one of those regulations that industries sort of see as, you know, a hindrance to their project.

So basically, if a nationwide permit for data centers is theoretically granted, they could move forward with a couple of years, shaved off the final project and they also might have to have less public notice of what they're planning to do, which is another ask that was in some of these documents.

ALI ROGIN: This isn't the first time that industries have requested these permits.

But what seems to be unique about this moment is the alignment between industry and the amenability of this administration.

Is that something that you are watching closely in terms of how this all plays out?

MOLLY TAFT: Yeah, I think that's an important point to make.

On the one hand, there are data centers that have the environmental footprint of like a Walmart.

It probably isn't that big of a deal.

But on the other hand, there are tech giants building massive data centers that could really impact the local waterways.

Amazon, for instance, is building a data center Indiana.

They would fill in almost 10 acres of wetland and impact thousands of streams in the region.

And so what we're tracking is, you know, less what might happen with specific projects, but more about how the Trump administration is using AI and using the build out of data centers in its larger deregulatory agenda.

This is checking off kind of wish list items from multiple industries to get some of these regulations out of the way.

ALI ROGIN: And what are the industry saying about why they need this permit?

What argument are they making that the benefits here outweigh the potential environmental risks?

Are they making that argument?

MOLLY TAFT: I think the industries are saying that, you know, in order for the U.S. to compete with China, we need to be building more data centers.

Tomorrow we're going to have this huge need for these projects.

Anywhere and everywhere there is availability and they need to go up as soon as possible for us to win the AI arms race.

And I think they'd also say that, you know, many of these buildings have less of an environmental footprint from their actual physical structures than some other things that might require, you know, a more thorough Clean Water act permit process.

But, you know, experts I spoke to were, did say, look, on the one hand it is true that some of these projects may not have as big of an environmental footprint, but on the other, especially when we're talking about data center and water use, this is such a complex topic and we're really seeing this industry kind of being let off the leash a little bit and kind of charging forward and building out structures across the country.

ALI ROGIN: Molly Taft with Wired.

Thank you so much.

MOLLY TAFT: Thank you so much for having me.