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Big tech, UAE make U.S. energy investments to support AI

The Trump administration has pointed to key partnerships, including with the United Arab Emirates and U.S. tech firms, to bolster U.S. power needs to keep up with AI advances.

Makenzie Holland
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Published: 17 Jun 2025

As President Donald Trump promises investments in next-generation nuclear energy and unleashing oil and gas, big tech vendors and the United Arab Emirates are also investing in U.S. energy infrastructure for power-hungry AI systems.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta are funneling investments into a wide range of energy sources -- from geothermal to nuclear -- to add future power supply for AI infrastructure, including data centers. AI data center electricity demands are expected to more than double current levels by 2030 and exceed the power consumption for manufacturing steel, aluminum, cement and chemicals combined, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.

U.S. leaders are recognizing growing energy demand for AI as well. The Trump administration has secured a 10-year, $1.4 trillion commitment from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to build or finance U.S. data centers and contribute to the U.S. energy, quantum computing and semiconductor boom. Meanwhile, tech companies including OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, together with Saudi Arabia AI venture capital fund MGX, are leading the $500 billion Stargate Project for U.S. AI infrastructure. OpenAI also launched Stargate UAE.

Meeting the AI energy demand is a "once in a generation investment opportunity," said Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE's minister of industry and advanced technology. Al Jaber spoke during the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Forum on Tuesday. 

"AI is driven by energy," he said. "In short, AI supremacy is essentially an energy play."

Energy investments to support AI infrastructure

Over the next ten years, the UAE plans to accelerate its U.S. energy investments from $70 billion to $440 billion, Al Jaber said. The UAE plans to make its investments through XRG, the UAE's international energy investment company.

"To realize the full power of AI, we must give it the power it needs," Al Jaber said. "We need policy that clears the path, infrastructure that carries the load and investment that meets the moment."  

Derisking capital investment for energy projects, removing regulatory barriers and fast-tracking permitting will unlock electric grid potential in the U.S., he added.

"The fact is, you can't run tomorrow's technology on yesterday's grid, and many of our grids were built for a completely different century and a completely different circumstance," Al Jaber said.

Indeed, while investing in next-generation energy technologies to provide additional electricity resources is critical, multiple challenges face the U.S. energy sector. Lengthy permitting timelines for new energy projects, the cost to build new technologies, and a lack of access to critical minerals could mean years before technologies such as next-generation nuclear reactors come online.

"AI in particular reflects the challenge of this moment in the energy system," said Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. "Energy demand from data centers is reshaping the curve of how much energy we need to build the next generation economy."

AI has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in economic growth in the U.S. and around the world, said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy at Google. However, the question is whether the U.S. can build the energy infrastructure necessary to power AI, she said.

"We don't use dial-up internet, we don't talk on rotary phones, yet our grid fundamentally looks the same as it did 30 to 40 years ago," she said.

Through work on improving existing electric grid infrastructure and investments in new energy technologies, Peterson Corio said Google is sending a signal that "we need to build and invest in new technology so that they can have the potential to reach scale."

Chris Lehane, chief policy officer and vice president of global affairs at OpenAI, said progress in AI "only happens if we have the energy." 

"At the end of the day, we need to have chips, we need to have data, we need to have talent, and most importantly, we need the energy to be able to put it all together," he said.

Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining Informa TechTarget, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.

 

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