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Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of sweeping AI policy recommendations to “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing.” Among the suggested environmental rollbacks laid out in both an executive order and a corresponding AI Action Plan is a set of specific recommendations to essentially loosen Clean Water Act permitting processes for data centers. They mirror suggestions made to regulators earlier this year by both a major data center lobbying group and Meta.
In March, the Data Center Coalition (DCC), a lobbying group for the industry whose members include tech giants like Google and Amazon Web Services, wrote a public comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to its request for information to develop the AI Action Plan. In the comment, the DCC suggested smoothing the permitting process for data centers under a specific section of the Clean Water Act. A similar ask around this section of the law was also made by DCC member Meta in its own separate response.
The part of the Clean Water Act specifically named in these comments and in the recommendations from the White House deals with how projects like data centers could impact federally protected waters during construction or use, and what materials are discharged into those waters or dredged from them. Activities that range from building a bridge or road to filling marshland to construct a building or redirecting a stream require a permit under Section 404 of the law.
Getting these types of permits, known as 404 permits, for individual projects can be expensive and time-consuming. But the government allows exemptions for a list of specific activities and industries, creating a nationwide permit that results in a process with less public participation and federal review. It’s this type of nationwide permit that the new Trump AI agenda seeks to gain for data centers. The AI Action Plan also recommends exempting data centers from what’s known as pre-construction notification, an additional form that helps regulators understand the impacts of a project before it begins—another proposal that was in the DCC public comment.
“The data center industry takes compliance and accountability seriously and works closely with the many local, state, regional, and federal bodies responsible for permitting and project approvals, regulation in environmental, safety, and other key areas, and oversight,” Cy McNeill, the director of federal affairs at DCC, told WIRED in an emailed comment.
Environmental lawyers who spoke with WIRED stressed that direct impacts from data centers depend entirely on the specifics of each individual project. Many data centers have relatively low environmental profiles for the buildings themselves. Filling in a marshy corner of a vacant lot is a practice done all over the country for all types of construction.
“For a while there was a joke that Walmarts were being built on wetlands, because it’s like, well, where’s the land that hasn’t already been developed?” says Jim McElfish, a senior adviser at the Environmental Law Institute, a research nonprofit.
There are currently more than 50 issued nationwide 404 permits—some of which still require pre-construction notifications—which are renewed once every five years. Many of those exemptions are for agricultural activities, like cranberry harvesting and constructing ponds for farms, or ecosystem and scientific services like surveying and soil maintenance. Some types of coal mining and oil and gas activity are also included in the program.
Buildings like stores, restaurants, hospitals, and schools currently have their own nationwide permit, which some data centers fall under. However, the permit requires a more in-depth, individual analysis if the project impacts more than half an acre of protected water.
The DCC in its March comment recommended the creation of a nationwide permit with “robust notification and coverage thresholds” and argued that “lengthy timelines for the approvals are not consistent with other national permits that have higher or no limits or have a threshold where a PCN is not needed, which allows immediate action.” Meta, which has announced its intent to build massive data centers across multiple states and is currently developing a 2,250-acre data center in Louisiana, also asked for a nationwide permit in its comment and suggested that the federal government further “streamline” the 404 permitting process.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan posted on X last week that the AI Action Plan “is a bold step to create the right regulatory environment for companies like ours to invest in America,” and that Meta is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars in job-creating infrastructure across the US, including state-of-the-art data centers.” Meta declined to comment further for this article through a spokesperson.
Environmental lawyers aren’t so sure that a nationwide permit for data centers, regardless of their size, would follow the intent of the Clean Water Act. “What makes [a blanket data center exemption] a little bit tricky is that the impacts are gonna differ quite a bit depending on where these are,” McElfish says. While one data center may impact just a “fraction of an acre,” he says, by rebuilding a stream crossing or filling in a wetland, other data centers in different areas of the country may have much larger impacts to local waterways during their construction.
Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees. “What we’re seeing here is an attempt to expand the 404 nationwide permitting program so that it goes through this much reduced regulatory review outside of the intention of why [the permitting] program was created,” she says. “There’s much reduced regulatory review to kind of literally speed along the paving of wetlands.”
There are some data center projects in development today that have run into significant issues with federally protected waters. In Indiana, Amazon is currently galvanizing local opposition as it attempts to fill in nearly 10 acres of wetland and more than 5,000 streams to build a massive data center. In Alabama, environmentalists caution that the water footprint from a proposed data center could have serious impacts on local waterways and cause the possible extinction of a species of fish.
In a response to a request to comment from WIRED, Amazon spokesperson Heather Layman sent several details via email on the company’s global water replenishment projects and its efforts to conserve water at its Indiana data centers. “To maintain global leadership in AI, the US must prioritize the deployment of energy generation and infrastructure to support data center growth,” she wrote. “We are also constantly working to optimize our water consumption across Amazon’s operations.”
The proposed changes from the White House are no surprise to lawyers like Connor: “The 404 permitting program has had a developer target on its back for a pretty long time,” she says. Sackett v. EPA, the 2023 Supreme Court case that dealt a major blow to the reach of the Clean Water Act, was based on a 404 permitting issue. This ruling, Connor suspects, is partly why we may be seeing so many companies choosing to build data centers in dry states like Arizona. “They have a lot of waters that have lost their jurisdictional reach within the Clean Water Act,” she says. “It’s just easier to pave over the desert, which is the saddest thing to say out loud.”
The coal industry has also battled for more than a decade to get nationwide 404 permits for mountaintop mining. Meanwhile, 404 permits for gas pipelines like the Mountain Valley Pipeline have been locked in years of litigation. The executive order signed Wednesday calls for a review of 404 permits not just for data centers, but for a host of other “covered components” that are used to build data centers, ranging from transmission lines to gas pipelines to coal and nuclear power equipment.
“The energy objectives of the administration are baked into [the new AI policies],” says Connor. Trump officials, she says, are “trying to create more dexterity in the 404 program for all the kinds of means that [they] want to be reflected within the administration’s priorities. That includes fossil fuels, that includes coal, and that includes data centers.”