[House Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                CONVERTING ENERGY INTO INTELLIGENCE: THE 
                 FUTURE OF AI TECHNOLOGY, HUMAN DIS-
               COVERY, AND AMERICAN GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                    COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             APRIL 9, 2025

                               __________

                           Serial No. 119-16
                           
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]                           


     Published for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce  
         
                   govinfo.gov/committee/house-energy
                        energycommerce.house.gov
                        
                                __________

                   U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
60-129 PDF                  WASHINGTON : 2025                  
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------                          

                   COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE

                        BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky
                                 Chairman
ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio                FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey
H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia           Ranking Member
GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida            DIANA DeGETTE, Colorado
RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina       JAN SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia    DORIS O. MATSUI, California
GARY J. PALMER, Alabama              KATHY CASTOR, Florida
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida                PAUL TONKO, New York
DAN CRENSHAW, Texas                  YVETTE D. CLARKE, New York
JOHN JOYCE, Pennsylvania, Vice       RAUL RUIZ, California
    Chairman                         SCOTT H. PETERS, California
RANDY K. WEBER, Sr., Texas           DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan
RICK W. ALLEN, Georgia               MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
TROY BALDERSON, Ohio                 ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois
RUSS FULCHER, Idaho                  NANETTE DIAZ BARRAGAN, California
AUGUST PFLUGER, Texas                DARREN SOTO, Florida
DIANA HARSHBARGER, Tennessee         KIM SCHRIER, Washington
MARIANNETTE MILLER-MEEKS, Iowa       LORI TRAHAN, Massachusetts
KAT CAMMACK, Florida                 LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas
JAY OBERNOLTE, California            ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York
JOHN JAMES, Michigan                 JAKE AUCHINCLOSS, Massachusetts
CLIFF BENTZ, Oregon                  TROY A. CARTER, Louisiana
ERIN HOUCHIN, Indiana                ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
RUSSELL FRY, South Carolina          KEVIN MULLIN, California
LAUREL M. LEE, Florida               GREG LANDSMAN, Ohio
NICHOLAS A. LANGWORTHY, New York     JENNIFER L. McCLELLAN, Virginia
THOMAS H. KEAN, Jr., New Jersey
MICHAEL A. RULLI, Ohio
GABE EVANS, Colorado
CRAIG A. GOLDMAN, Texas
JULIE FEDORCHAK, North Dakota
                                 ------                                

                           Professional Staff

                     MEGAN JACKSON, Staff Director
                SOPHIE KHANAHMADI, Deputy Staff Director
               TIFFANY GUARASCIO, Minority Staff Director
                             
                             
                             C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page
Hon. Brett Guthrie, a Representative in Congress from the 
  Commonwealth of Kentucky, opening statement....................     2
    Prepared statement...........................................     4
Hon. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Representative in Congress from the 
  State of New Jersey, opening statement.........................     6
    Prepared statement...........................................     8

                               Witnesses

Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., Chair, Special Competitive Studies Project..    11
    Prepared statement...........................................    13
    Answers to submitted questions...............................   206
Manish Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Global Operations, 
  Micron.........................................................    21
    Prepared statement...........................................    23
    Answers to submitted questions...............................   211
David M. Turk, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Center on Global 
  Energy Policy, Columbia University School of International and 
  Public Affairs.................................................    32
    Prepared statement...........................................    34
    Answers to submitted questions...............................   218
Alexander Wang, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Scale AI....    50
    Prepared statement...........................................    52
    Answers to submitted questions...............................   221

                           Submitted Material

Inclusion of the following was approved by unanimous consent.
List of documents submitted for the record.......................   146
Report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 
  ``The Electricity Supply Bottleneck on U.S. AI Dominance,'' by 
  Cy McGready, et al., March 2025................................   147
Letter of April 9, 2025, from Tom Mapes, Founder and President, 
  Digital Energy Council, to Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone.........   164
Report of North America's Electric Reliability Corporation, 
  ``2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment,'' December 2024.......   168
Report of the CATO Institute, ``The Budgetary Cost of the 
  Inflation Reduction Act's Energy Subsidies,'' by Travis Fisher 
  and Joshua Loucks, March 11, 2025..............................   178
Letter from Danielle Russo, Executive Director, Center for Grid 
  Security, SAFE, to Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone.................   198
Report of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Havard Law 
  School, ``Extracting Profits from the Public: How Utility 
  Ratepayers Are Paying for Big Tech's Power,'' by Eliza Martin 
  and Ari Peskoe, March 2025\1\
Article of April 8, 2025, ``Exclusive: Micron to impose tariff-
  related surcharge on some products from April 9, sources say,'' 
  Reuters........................................................   200
Article of April 8, 2025, ``Why Trump's tariff and tax policies 
  could derail efforts to boost US power supply,'' by Catherine 
  Morehouse, PoliticoPro.........................................   201

----------

\1\ The report has been retained in committee files and is included in 
the Documents for the Record at https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/
IF00/20250409/118133/HHRG-119-IF00-20250409-SD095.pdf.

 
CONVERTING ENERGY INTO INTELLIGENCE: THE FUTURE OF AI TECHNOLOGY, HUMAN 
             DISCOVERY, AND AMERICAN GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS

                              ----------                              


                        WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2025

                  House of Representatives,
                          Committee on Energy and Commerce,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:04 a.m. in the 
John D. Dingell Room 2123, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. 
Brett Guthrie (chairman of the committee) presiding.
    Members present: Representatives Guthrie, Latta, Griffith, 
Bilirakis, Hudson, Carter of Georgia, Palmer, Dunn, Joyce, 
Weber, Allen, Balderson, Fulcher, Pfluger, Harshbarger, Miller-
Meeks, Cammack, Obernolte, Bentz, Fry, Lee, Rulli, Evans, 
Goldman, Fedorchak, Pallone (ranking member), DeGette, 
Schakowsky, Matsui, Castor, Tonko, Clarke, Ruiz, Peters, 
Dingell, Veasey, Kelly, Barragan, Soto, Schrier, Trahan, 
Fletcher, Ocasio-Cortez, Auchincloss, Carter of Louisiana, 
Menendez, Mullin, Landsman, and McClellan.
    Staff present: Ansley Boylan, Director of Operations; Clara 
Cargile, Professional Staff Member; Marjorie Connell, Director 
of Archives; Jessica Donlon, General Counsel; Andrew Furman, 
Professional Staff Member; Sydney Greene, Director of Finance 
and Logistics; Jay Gulshen, Chief Counsel; Emily Hale, Staff 
Assistant; Kate Harper, Chief Counsel; Brittany Havens, Chief 
Counsel; Megan Jackson, Staff Director; Daniel Kelly, Press 
Secretary; Patrick Kelly, Staff Assistant; Sophie Khanahmadi, 
Deputy Staff Director; Alex Khlopin, Clerk; Brayden Lacefield, 
Special Assistant; Giulia Leganski, Chief Counsel; Mary Martin, 
Chief Counsel; Joel Miller, Chief Counsel; Ben Mullaney, Press 
Secretary; Elaina Murphy, Professional Staff Member; Kaitlyn 
Peterson, Policy Analyst; Brannon Rains, Professional Staff 
Member; Evangelos Razis, Professional Staff Member; Seth 
Ricketts, Special Assistant; Jake Riith, Staff Assistant; 
Jackson Rudden, Staff Assistant; Chris Sarley, Member Services/
Stakeholder Director; Peter Spencer, Senior Professional Staff 
Member; Kaley Stidham, Press Assistant; Dray Thorne, Director 
of Information Technology; Matt VanHyfte, Communications 
Director; Hannah Anton, Minority Policy Analyst; Rasheedah 
Blackwood, Minority Intern; Tiffany Guarascio, Minority Staff 
Director; Lisa Hone, Minority Chief Counsel, Commerce, 
Manufacturing, and Trade; Kristopher Pittard, Minority 
Professional Staff Member; Emma Roehrig, Minority Staff 
Assistant; Kylea Rogers, Minority Policy Analyst; Harikrishnan 
Sanil, Minority Press Intern; Andrew Souvall, Minority Director 
of Communications, Outreach, and Member Services; and Tuley 
Wright, Minority Staff Director, Energy.
    Mr. Guthrie. The committee will come to order.
    Welcome, everybody, the committee, back. We appreciate 
everybody being back this morning for, I think, what is going 
to be an absolutely exciting hearing.
    And I will recognize myself for 5 minutes for an opening 
statement

 OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. BRETT GUTHRIE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
           CONGRESS FROM THE COMMONWEALTH OF KENTUCKY

    And I want to thank our witnesses for being here and 
traveling a long distance to be here.
    This kind of came from our Library of Congress, this 
hearing, from a presentation that Dr. Schmidt put on his book 
``Genesis'' that he wrote with Henry Kissinger--Henry 
Kissinger's last book.
    And I walked away thinking we needed to have the entire 
Congress hear your presentation, and so we are doing it with 
the entire Energy and Commerce Committee, because I think an 
author always wants to know, when they write a book, will 
somebody read my book? And then if they read the book, then 
will it have an impact? Well, today you and all the witnesses 
are before the full Energy and Commerce Committee.
    And our dear colleague and the dear husband of our 
colleague Debbie Dingell used to say that if it is moving, it 
is energy; if it stops, it is commerce. Something to that 
effect. So we have a lot of jurisdiction. I say it takes energy 
to move commerce. I can't improve on Chairman Dingell, but that 
is my version of it. And so we are having a full hearing. We 
typically do this in subcommittee, but this touches all 
jurisdictions, and I think everybody needs to hear it.
    If you think about it, it is going to take enormous energy 
to beat China to AI. We--in doing that, we have to protect the 
environment. Our telecom--and privacy--through our commerce and 
telecom committees will be dealing with this. And AI has 
particular healthcare applications, so it touches all of our 
jurisdiction.
    And Dr. Schmidt, when I walked away from the Library of 
Congress and I read your book, it gave me a sense of mission, 
and the mission--a direction I want to take this committee in 
the time that I am chairman. And to sum up what you said, it is 
the U.S. versus China, and who will win the war for AI. And 
it--essentially, I walked away, this is as important as the 
dollar being the reserve currency in the world. It is that 
important, and that is what is before us.
    And we--what I hear from people in this space is that we 
have the brainpower and we have the capital. What we need is 
the energy and the correct regulatory framework. And we have an 
example of what not to do, and I believe you said Europe--in 
your presentation--Europe has chosen not to grow, so we can't 
look there as an example. We have to work through it ourselves.
    And Europe's regulatory framework, their energy framework 
and the regulatory framework, some of their regulatory 
framework written specifically to disadvantage American 
companies, has made them noncompetitive. And Europe and the 
U.S. had a similar size economy in 2008, and I have read that 
our economy is up about 80 percent larger.
    So what do we need to do? And the reason we want to do a 
full committee is that we have to have broad consensus on how 
we work together, it has to be Democrat and Republican.
    People who tell me they invest, it is tough to invest based 
on congressional cycles or presidential cycles if the rules are 
going to change every 2 to 4 years. And so what I would like 
to--just hopefully what we could do in this committee is come 
up with a regulatory framework and an energy policy that we can 
all--or most of us--can agree on, at least build a broad 
consensus on how we develop massive amounts of energy while 
protecting our environment.
    And Dr. Schmidt, you said all energy resources are needed, 
and then AI will develop solutions to deal with climate change. 
And so Microsoft--to put this in perspective, Microsoft Data 
Center can use as much power as the City of Seattle, is what I 
have been told.
    And so in the regulation side of it, we have to protect our 
privacy. Yesterday--we had a hearing on bills yesterday on 
child--children's privacy and children's safety. And we have to 
protect our privacy. I think all of us want our privacy 
protected. We can't do it in a heavy-handed way that stifles 
innovation. And as I said, we have to look at our friends 
across the Atlantic.
    But I think we need to more intently look across the 
Pacific to a nation determined to win. China has specifically 
said they are going to win the war on AI, and we are taking up 
the challenge to prove to them that the American entrepreneur 
and the American intellect will win the war on AI, but they 
have to have the energy and the regulatory environment to do 
so.
    So if this committee gets it right--this committee gets it 
right, America will win. They may win if--otherwise, but we 
need to be there to make that happen. And if you look at what 
if China wins--we just had a hearing of--an oversight--that a 
medical device from China had an embedded URL to the University 
of Beijing. So why does that mean--a medical device? Because we 
know they are using everything they can, everything they can to 
get information they need on us.
    So we must win. We will win. And for the sake of the world, 
we have to win. And I am determined through this hearing--to 
the beginning--that all of us will work together, because all 
of us are dedicated to winning.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Guthrie follows:]
    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Guthrie. And I will yield back and recognize the 
ranking member for 5 minutes for an opening statement.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FRANK PALLONE, Jr., A REPRESENTATIVE 
            IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY

    Mr. Pallone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Under normal circumstances, today's hearing would be a 
bipartisan conversation on ensuring America continues to lead 
the race on artificial intelligence, or AI. However, these are 
not normal times. President Trump is single-handedly destroying 
our economy. Since he unnecessarily instigated a global trade 
war, our markets are in turmoil, Americans' retirement savings 
is in freefall, and prices for everyday goods are spiking. In 
fact, Trump's tariffs are the largest middle-class tax increase 
in at least 50 years on hard-working American families.
    And our efforts to continue to lead the global race on AI 
innovation are seriously threatened when Trump has just spiked 
the price on materials we need to compete, such as steel, 
aluminum, and chips. Instead of winning the future, Trump's 
economic turmoil could send America's tech leadership into a 
tailspin.
    There is no doubt that the daily chaos and uncertainty that 
Trump is creating is not good for American business or for the 
American people. Despite the unwillingness of the President and 
Republicans to acknowledge any of the harm their actions are 
having on American families, I want to address the topic of 
today's hearing because it is so important.
    As we have heard in every Energy Subcommittee hearing this 
year, increased energy demand is coming, largely powered by 
data centers fueling artificial intelligence tools. And I 
firmly believe that this increased demand can be a good thing, 
but it must be managed responsibly. We must make sure that AI-
driven energy demand increases don't make electricity 
unaffordable or unreliable for American families. We must also 
make sure that consumers aren't stuck bearing the cost for 
infrastructure investments made necessary by private companies. 
And we must get a better understanding of just how much energy 
demand will increase in the coming years.
    The committee needs to be talking about all these things. 
But instead, this week House Republicans are poised to vote on 
a budget resolution that would set the stage to repeal the 
energy tax credits incentivizing well over 90 percent of the 
electricity generation poised to come onto the grid. The Trump 
administration and Elon Musk's DOGE minions are also putting 
together a secret list of grants and loans that they want to 
cancel that would modernize our electric grid and build new 
energy generation.
    Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon Trump signed several 
Executive orders to allow polluting coal plants to--set for 
retirement to continue to operate, increasing prices and health 
risks for American families. And just last month, during a 
speech to the joint session of Congress, Trump threatened to 
repeal the CHIPS and Science Act, which invested $52 billion to 
ensure more semiconductors are produced right here in the U.S.
    Semiconductors are critical to the advancement of AI, but 
right now the overwhelming majority are produced outside the 
United States, and the CHIPS and Science Act is boosting 
production of chips here, and now Trump wants to repeal the 
law. So Republicans constantly talk about winning the AI race, 
but the actions they are taking make it appear as if they are 
purposely trying to lose that race to China.
    And we should also discuss the tremendous effects AI will 
have on our everyday lives. We have seen an explosion of AI 
systems and tools that have been trained on massive amounts of 
Americans' personal information without our knowledge and 
consent. Right now, sufficient guardrails do not exist to 
protect Americans and our data from harmful AI systems that 
violate our privacy, provide false information, or make 
unjustifiable, discriminatory decisions.
    Because many of these systems are trained on massive 
amounts of data that big tech has collected on all of us, the 
lack of nationwide protections around what data companies can 
collect, use, and sell to train these AI systems should concern 
every American. Clearly defined privacy and data security rules 
are critical to protect consumers from existing harmful data 
collection practices and to safeguard them from the growing 
privacy threat that AI models pose.
    So I strongly believe that the bedrock of any AI regulation 
must be privacy legislation built on the principle of limiting 
the amount of consumer data collected, used, and shared. It is 
the best way to address the aggressive and abusive data 
collection practices of Big Tech and data brokers, ensure our 
children's sensitive information is protected online, and put 
consumers back in control of their data.
    So I look forward to hearing from today's witnesses and 
intend to continue to focus on developing policies that will 
harness the transformation power of AI while safeguarding the 
rights and well-being of all Americans.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Pallone follows:]
    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Pallone. And with that I yield back. Thank you, Mr. 
Chairman.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentleman yields back, and we 
now conclude with Member opening statements.
    The Chair would like to remind Members that, pursuant to 
the committee rules, all Members' opening statements will be 
made part of the record.
    I would also remind Members that, once we get to the 5-
minute questioning, we will have to strictly enforce that. We 
have a time constraints with some of our witnesses, and I want 
everybody to have the chance to ask their questions.
    I would like to thank the witnesses for being here today. 
It is--and you are taking time to testify before this 
committee. It is greatly appreciated. You will have the 
opportunity to give an opening statement, followed by a round 
of questions from Members and our witness.
    I will read the witnesses, and I will call on you 
individually to read--for your opening statement.
    So first we have Dr. Eric Schmidt, chair of the Special 
Competitive Studies Project. Dr. Schmidt previously served as 
the chief executive officer and chairman of Google. In addition 
to serving as executive chairman and technical advisor, his 
time at Google would turn the company into the global tech 
giant we know it today. In 2021 he founded the nonpartisan 
Special Competitive Studies Project to strengthen America's 
long-term competitiveness regarding AI and America's future, 
and also the author, as we have said, of--and a Library of 
Congress spokesman of the book ``Genesis'' he wrote with Dr. 
Kissinger.
    So thank you for being here.
    Dr. Manish Bhatia. Mr. Manish Bhatia, executive vice 
president of global operations with Micron Technology. Mr. 
Bhatia has been with Micron since 2017, and has 25 years of 
engineering and operations experience. He has previously held 
positions at Western Digital Corporation, SanDisk Corporation, 
and Matrix Semiconductor, to name just a few.
    The Honorable David Turk, a visiting fellow with the Center 
on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of 
International and Public Affairs. Mr. Turk served as the Deputy 
Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden 
administration. Before his time as Deputy Secretary, Mr. Turk 
spent several years at the International Energy Agency.
    Thank you for being here, as well.
    And Mr. Alexandr Wang, the founder and chief executive 
officer of Scale AI. Mr. Wang founded Scale AI as a 19-year-old 
student at MIT, focusing on the concept of humanity-first 
artificial intelligence. Currently, Scale AI has a team of over 
900 and is valued at nearly $14 billion. At 24, he is the 
youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
    So I thank you all for being here today, and I will call on 
each of you, and I will begin with Dr. Schmidt. You have 5 
minutes for your opening statement. Thank you.
    And you will see--before you get started--there are--you 
will have a green light, and when it gets to 4 minutes, I think 
a light turns yellow, so it will kind of give you a warning in 
front of you, you have a minute, and when it turns red it will 
be--wrap it up, so we can make sure we get all our questions 
in.
    So Dr. Schmidt, your 5 minutes, you are recognized.

 STATEMENTS OF ERIC SCHMIDT, Ph.D., CHAIR, SPECIAL COMPETITIVE 
  STUDIES PROJECT; MANISH BHATIA, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF 
    GLOBAL OPERATIONS, MICRON; DAVID M. TURK, DISTINGUISHED 
   VISITING FELLOW, CENTER ON GLOBAL ENERGY POLICY, COLUMBIA 
  UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS; AND 
  ALEXANDR WANG, FOUNDER AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SCALE AI

                STATEMENT OF ERIC SCHMIDT, Ph.D.

    Dr. Schmidt. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, 
Ranking Member. Thank you all for being here. This is 
incredibly important.
    I am here to tell you that I honestly believe that the AI 
revolution is underhyped, and here is why. The arrival of this 
new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the 
world in ways we cannot fully understand. And none of us, 
including myself and, frankly, anyone in this room, is prepared 
for the implications of this.
    What is happening at the moment in our industry is that we 
are very, very quickly, for example, developing AI programmers, 
and these AI programmers will replace traditional software 
programmers. We are building in the next year AI mathematicians 
that are as good as the top-level graduate students in math. 
This is happening very quickly. You can look at this in a 
number of the products. Today you think of AI as ChatGPT, but 
what it really is is a reasoning and planning system that we 
have never seen before. The implication of this is profound.
    In terms of the way the algorithms work, they are going to 
need a lot more computation than we have ever had. They are 
going to need a lot more energy, and I will talk about that. 
What does the industry need? We need high skills immigration. 
We talk to you about this every day. Light touch regulation 
around cyber and bio threats. We can talk about that. And most 
importantly, we need the energy. And the numbers are profound.
    What we need from you, if I may say that directly, is we 
need energy in all forms, renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It 
needs to be there, and it needs to be quickly. I and others are 
investing in things like fusion, which are incredible, but they 
are not going to arrive soon enough for the need. And I will 
frame this at the end by my comments about China.
    So people are planning 10 gigawatt data centers. Now, just 
to do the translation, an average nuclear power plant in the 
United States is 1 gigawatt. How many nuclear power plants can 
we make in 1 year, where we are planning this 10-gigawatt data 
center? It gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many 
people think that the demand in--of--energy part that our 
industry takes will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total 
generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is 
that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of 
power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. It gives you a 
sense of the scale that we are talking. These things are 
industrial at a scale I have never seen in my life.
    In the terms of energy planning, the current model is 
mostly natural gas, peaker plants plus renewables. And that is 
probably going to be the path we are going to have to follow, 
right, to get there, and for all the reasons that you can 
imagine. We have a bunch of regulatory issues around fixing the 
energy grid. It takes, on average, 18 years to get the power 
transmissions and so forth to put these things in place. We 
need to find Federal ways to preempt that and make it happen 
faster in order to deal with the needs.
    Many of these data centers, by the way, are in the 
heartland. They have a huge economic impact positively on areas 
that typically do not have the kind of growth that they would 
like.
    Now, why is this all important? When you build these 
systems, you have intelligence in the computer, and then 
eventually human-level intelligence. Some people think it is 
within 3 to 4 years. Then, after that, you have something 
called superintelligence, and superintelligence is the 
intelligence that is higher than of humans. We believe, as an 
industry, that this could occur within a decade. It is crucial 
that America get there first.
    What is China doing? They are leading in some open source. 
They are very close behind us. You all have done a great job in 
doing chip restrictions and things like that to try to slow 
them down. They are clever and they are smart. They have 
industrial programs, huge grants going into these companies, 
and they are weaponizing up in the sense of competition. If you 
look at DeepSeek, DeepSeek showed up, right, nobody expected 
this. It turns out it is on par now with some of the top 
models. Welcome. China has arrived into the competition.
    What would happen if China beat us? Let's think about it. 
The path to intelligence, that superhuman intelligence, think 
of the national security implications of that competition. This 
is why I believe--and I will say it directly to you--that 
although everyone is concerned about Taiwan, I am much more 
concerned about this. Because if they come to 
superintelligence, the strong form of intelligence, first, it 
changes the balance of power globally in ways that we have no 
way of understanding, predicting, or dealing with.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. Schmidt follows:]
    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. Thank you for that sober 
assessment. It is why we wanted to have this hearing. We 
appreciate that very much. Now we will recognize Mr. Bhatia.
    You have your 5 minutes for your opening statement.

                   STATEMENT OF MANISH BHATIA

    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member 
Pallone, and members of the committee. My name is Manish 
Bhatia, and I serve as executive vice president of global 
operations at Micron.
    Micron was founded in 1978 in Boise, Idaho, and over the 
last several decades has become one of the world's most 
innovative companies, with more than 58,000 U.S. patents 
granted. And Micron is America's only manufacturer of memory 
chips, and the only U.S. semiconductor company with worldwide 
technology leadership today. Micron is truly a national 
treasure.
    Micron has become fundamental to America's economic 
competitiveness because our fabs manufactured the world's most 
advanced memory chips and are at the heart of the AI 
revolution. For each AI chip that Nvidia sells, there are 96 
high-bandwidth memory chips integrated with it. Without our 
chips, there simply is no AI.
    Micron is the only company planning to invest more than 
$100 billion over the next 20 years to build leading-edge 
memory fabs here in the United States. These investments will 
power America's AI leadership, they will serve domestic demand 
for other industries, and drive U.S. semiconductor exports. Our 
investments are projected to create 11,000 high-paying direct 
Micron jobs, 9,000 construction jobs, and ultimately, between 
direct and indirect, 80,000 new jobs created across our 
expansions planned in Idaho, New York, and Virginia.
    The President and Congress have made clear that the United 
States needs to continue to lead on AI and increased domestic 
manufacturing. The success of our investments will keep the 
U.S. at the forefront of the AI revolution, strengthen the 
economy, and make America more secure.
    To make our historic U.S. investments, we need reliable and 
affordable energy. One of the most important factors that made 
upstate New York and Boise, Idaho, attractive for our planned 
investments is reliable, low-cost power. And in Virginia, where 
we have been operating for two decades, grid reliability has 
been critical to our operations. Each of these full-scale fabs 
built here will run 24/7, 365 days a year and consume, at full 
build-out, about 400 megawatts of power. By 2040 we expect our 
U.S. energy demands to reach 2 gigawatts. This demand comes 
from a variety of highly complex manufacturing process steps, 
including using extreme ultraviolet lasers to create advanced 
nanoscale features on our chips.
    Beyond scale, we also need power to be reliable. Even 
fractions of a second of power loss or even just power sag or 
droop forces us to reset equipment, check for inconsistencies 
and deviations in the material, and ultimately can cost tens or 
even hundreds of millions of dollars. Reliable power is 
critical to our U.S. expansion.
    Historically, the United States has maintained low 
electricity prices due to the abundance of energy resources and 
its all-of-the-above approach. From oil and natural gas to 
solar and nuclear, this was a bright spot for Micron as we 
built here at home, and is one of America's key competitive 
advantages in manufacturing. However, after years of matched 
supply and demand, we are now seeing significant electricity 
demand growth, and supply may struggle to keep pace. By one 
estimate, U.S. electricity demand could rise by 128 gigawatts, 
more than 15 percent over the next 5 years alone. This risks 
the United States losing leadership in AI and in the 
technologies that enable it.
    Meeting this energy demand means the Federal Government 
needs to take an all-of-the-above approach and cut through red 
tape to bring generating projects to life. We also need to 
invest in energy equipment and supply chains. When I visited 
the Idaho National Lab last month to discuss their cutting-edge 
work on advanced nuclear technologies, it became clear how much 
investment is needed in uranium fuel supply chains and other 
new technologies.
    Beyond generating capacity and energy supply chains, we 
need to ensure that U.S. transmission infrastructure is fit for 
the 21st century. Without new and updated transmission 
infrastructure, new generation won't deliver--won't be able to 
be delivered to customers like us. This is why permitting 
reform to accelerate transmission infrastructure is so 
important.
    Taking a step back and looking at manufacturing and AI more 
broadly, this also means continued investment in manufacturers 
that enable the AI revolution. Micron and other U.S. 
semiconductor companies building and operating fabs in the U.S. 
experience cost deltas with our Asian competitors of 35 to 45 
percent. To ensure U.S. global competitiveness, we are calling 
for an extension and expansion of the expiring Semiconductor 
Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit. This will continue to 
enable the success of America's semiconductor manufacturing 
renaissance.
    Finally, to echo Chairman Guthrie's remarks, having 
consistent, reliable regulations, particularly in energy and 
permitting, allows Micron to make long-term manufacturing 
investments at home so the country can lead in manufacturing 
and in AI.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Bhatia follows:]
   [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.
    Mr.--the Honorable Mr. Turk, you are recognized for your 5-
minute opening statement.

                   STATEMENT OF DAVID M. TURK

    Mr. Turk. Chairman Guthrie, Ranking Member Pallone, and 
distinguished Members, thank you for the opportunity to testify 
today.
    More importantly, let me thank you for this committee's 
concerted, sustained focus on both the opportunities and the 
risks surrounding artificial intelligence.
    As someone who has spent a lot of time in windowless rooms, 
including giving my last 4 years as Deputy Secretary of the 
U.S. Department of Energy, let me clearly state my bottom line 
up front: Housing as many AI data centers as possible, 
especially cutting-edge AI training models, within our country 
is both an economic and a national security imperative. There 
is no more powerful and transformational technology facing our 
world.
    I have also found that the experts who understand AI the 
best are the ones who most forcefully stress the need for 
thoughtful, effective guardrails and protections.
    As the title of this hearing suggests, we need to quickly 
and affordably convert energy into intelligence. The best 
numbers I have found come from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 
in terms of what we need to prepare for. In 2023, data centers 
used 4.4 percent of the overall electricity in the United 
States. By just 2028, data centers' total usage will increase 
to between 6.7 to 12 percent.
    Let me share a three-part strategy to satisfy this 
increasing electricity demand.
    First, we need to maintain the full range of tax 
incentives, grants, loans, and other tools in our tool belt. 
Now is exactly the wrong time to make it more expensive to 
bring online new electrons.
    Getting rid of just the technology-neutral production and 
investment tax credits 45Y and 48E will substantially raise the 
costs and delay our ability to power AI. A repeal of just these 
tech-neutral tax credits would also increase prices on average 
U.S. households between $140 to $220 each and every year.
    Grants and loans, including from the Bipartisan 
Infrastructure Law, are also vital. Utility CEOs, developers, 
rural electric cooperatives are all urging Congress to retain 
these important tax, grant, and loan tools.
    Let us also remember that, among others, the Independent 
Energy Information Administration predicts that a full 93 
percent of additional capacity added to our grids in 2025 will 
be with renewables and storage.
    Finally, uncertainty, whether caused by deliberations in 
Congress or President Trump's tariff policy, will also chill 
needed near-term investment to power AI.
    Second, we need to redouble all our efforts to more quickly 
permit new power generation and new transmission in our country 
without sacrificing important protections. Recent bipartisan 
efforts, such as the Barrasso-Manchin Energy Permitting Reform 
Act, provide a promising foundation for further progress.
    And third, we should more fully leverage public-private 
partnerships, including with strategic use of Federal land for 
cutting-edge AI, something advanced by both the Biden and the 
Trump administrations. Ensuring cutting-edge AI data centers 
remain in the United States also gives our democracy a fighting 
chance to provide effective and efficient guardrails on AI 
technology. Companies by themselves simply do not have all the 
requisite expertise, nor do they have a perspective that takes 
into account all relevant considerations.
    We need to fully leverage our biological, chemical, and 
nuclear government experts to help companies red-team new 
models to ensure they don't inadvertently empower terrorists 
and rogue states. We have made some progress, including 
voluntary cooperation with companies, but we must do more and 
we must make this a requirement. Safeguards against 
misinformation, deepfakes, model hallucinations, and privacy 
infringement must also be a top priority to protect public 
trust and democracy.
    Let me conclude by reiterating what I heard from you very 
clearly, Mr. Chairman, and I think we will hear again and again 
throughout this hearing. We are in a global AI race. The stakes 
are too high for us to lose. I think Dr. Schmidt put it 
incredibly eloquently with his opening statement. To win, we 
must all work together, and we cannot take any tools off our 
toolbelt to quickly power AI.
    Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member, and other committee 
members, thank you again for your diligent, your bipartisan, 
and your urgent focus on AI. I look forward to your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Turk follows:]
   [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. I appreciate your testimony.
    Mr. Wang, you are now recognized for 5 minutes for your 
opening statement.

                   STATEMENT OF ALEXANDR WANG

    Mr. Wang. Chairman Guthrie, Ranking Member Pallone, and 
members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be 
here today to discuss the steps that must be taken to ensure 
U.S. leadership in AI.
    My name is Alexandr Wang. I am the founder and CEO of Scale 
AI. Today's hearing is personal for me. I grew up in Los 
Alamos, where my parents were physicists at the National Lab, 
the birthplace of the atomic bomb. They taught me that 
America's leadership in science and technology is vital to our 
national security and global strength.
    At MIT, I learned that progress in AI depends on three key 
elements: data, compute, and algorithms. While most of my 
classmates pursued expertise in compute and algorithms, few 
were focused on the data challenge. That inspired me to start 
Scale. We deliver expert-level data and offer technology 
solutions to leading AI labs, multinational enterprises, and 
the U.S. Government and our allies. At Scale we keep humans at 
the center of everything we do because AI should always work 
for us, not the other way around.
    Over the past decade, it has become clear that the United 
States faces intense global competition in determining how AI 
should evolve and who should lead. In 2018 the Chinese 
Communist Party's AI master plan started taking shape. They 
were already developing advanced AI capabilities and using that 
technology to surveil and suppress their people.
    Fast forward to today. Their plan is more sophisticated and 
expansive. It includes four key areas of focus: first, the CCP 
is taking a whole-of-country approach, having recently launched 
their AI+ initiative; second, the CCP is outinvesting us in 
data, spending billions on AI-ready data, and unlocking vast 
public data sets to fuel AI systems; third, they are finding 
ways to catch up on compute and building out their physical 
infrastructure; and lastly, they are developing leading AI 
models and exporting them to the world.
    But we are not here today to just talk about what China is 
doing but to identify how the U.S. can lead. Given how close 
the competition is across all foundational elements, the 
policies this Congress promotes could determine the outcome. 
Global AI dominance is not about trying to level the playing 
field by mimicking China's authoritarian way of government and 
AI adoption.
    Instead, the United States must charter our own course, one 
that is anchored in American values. This is vital to our long-
term national security. This requires decisive action by the 
United States across four main themes: dominate, unleash, 
innovate, and promote.
    To dominate, we need to win on data. The U.S. Government is 
one of the largest producers of data in the world, but 
currently most of that data is unavailable to advance American 
AI leadership.
    There are three immediate actions that would move us 
forward towards data dominance. First, establish a national AI 
data reserve. This resource should serve as a centralized hub 
for the Government's AI work, housing relevant government data 
and allowing it to be easily shared between agencies and 
enabling widespread AI adoption. Second, make all Government 
data AI-ready, and stand up AI data infrastructure to enable 
scaled implementation. And third, Congress should invest to 
position data dominance as a national priority.
    The next theme is unleash, meaning we must unleash AI 
technology and establish an agentic government. An agentic 
government is one that uses AI under human supervision to 
enhance its operations. For example, Federal agencies could 
leverage AI to streamline veteran healthcare paperwork, improve 
fraud detection at the IRS, and boost efficiency and 
information-sharing across agencies. This will improve the 
lives of public employees and the American people. Congress 
should require each agency to set up at least one flagship 
agentic government program.
    Next, we must maximize the ability of companies to 
innovate. I believe the right regulatory framework is one that 
allows for innovation while still creating proper guardrails. 
Congress should take three actions: first, confirm a use-case-
based regulatory framework and conduct an analysis to address 
regulatory gaps; second, establish one single Federal AI 
governance standard to avoid patchwork legislation at the State 
level; and third, implement policies that enable American 
workers to become the AI workforce of the future. These 
policies would provide the skills necessary to train, fine-
tune, and evaluate AI systems.
    The final theme is promote, meaning we need to promote U.S. 
technology globally. Countries around the world, what I call AI 
geopolitical swing states, will soon be forced to choose 
between Western or CCP-controlled technology. To help make sure 
they choose Western technology, Congress and the administration 
should empower NIST to complete all relevant measurement 
science for AI and export it to the world through the global 
network of AI safety institutes.
    America led the Industrial Revolution, the Space Race, the 
Internet Age. AI is the next frontier, and, with your 
assistance, I am confident we will lead again.
    Thank you for the opportunity to be here today, and I look 
forward to your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Wang follows:]
    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony, as 
well. We will now begin questioning, and I will recognize 
myself for 5 minutes for questions.
    So Mr.--Dr. Schmidt, you talked about we need all available 
sources of energy, and I think you said in the Library of 
Congress we can use AI to solve climate change. If we are going 
to try to build a broad coalition, we can't just go for energy 
without dealing with climate. And we can't just do climate and 
not have energy, because though wind, solar, and batteries are 
important, they won't supply the energy that we need. So what 
do you mean by all sources of energy, and how do you think that 
we could solve climate through AI?
    Dr. Schmidt. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    As we discussed, the needs of our industry are so great 
that we cannot cut down any of the sources of energy right now. 
Why does this make sense, knowing that climate change is real, 
and knowing that it is a problem, is that the intelligence 
revolution, the ability to do planning and discovery, will 
allow us as Americans to develop new materials, new energy 
sources, and so forth because of the AI data centers.
    So our core argument is invest in the way we can now, 
because the future will be so much cleaner and so much more 
efficient as a result of these algorithms.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you for that. And also, you said in the 
Library of Congress that Europe has chosen not to grow. As we 
look to our competitor across the Pacific--I mentioned we look 
over to the Atlantic--what lessons learned do you think we need 
to look--as we say, a lot of times people look at Europe and 
want to see what they are doing and copy it. What should we not 
do that Europe has done?
    Dr. Schmidt. Europe is a wonderful place to visit, but it 
is not growing. It has great human values, but it is not 
growing. As a result, everyone is unhappy. The standard of 
living between the United States and Europe has now diverged. 
The U.S. lives much better than Europeans, which is annoying to 
my European friends.
    There are so many reasons why economic growth is important. 
Growth solves every problem in a democracy.
    Mr. Guthrie. Well, thanks. So you were talking about 
better--so what kind of things have Europe--decisions European 
leaders have made that we need to avoid?
    Dr. Schmidt. Well, the primary issue is overregulation. We 
have a similar problem in America in that the overlapping set 
of local-Federal-State rules, which were done with good 
intentions, have the property that they are slowing things 
down. Our competitor, China, is not a democracy, it is an 
autocracy, whatever you want to call it, and they just decide.
    In this fight, as I said before, if they get there first we 
will be very upset. All of us will be alive when this occurs. 
Every one of you will see it. Imagine a situation where attacks 
that we cannot even imagine are unleashed by China in an 
adversarial thing. We have no concept of having a 
superintelligent opponent where we are not as intelligent as 
they are.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thanks. So in your article I have here on The 
Atlantic--or the Foreign Affairs, I am sorry, the Foreign 
Affairs, you wrote, essentially, technological advances in the 
next 5 to 10 years will determine the country that gains the 
upper hand. I have a couple of minutes. Could you kind of 
explain militarily what this means?
    And then, what--because you wrote about what they can do 
militarily. And then this is--we need to act now.
    Dr. Schmidt. So in the framing in China and Taiwan, which 
is discussed a great deal, everyone assumes that it is a battle 
of missiles and aircraft carriers. That is not correct. It will 
be a battle of swarms of drones. Those drones will be highly 
intelligent, highly planned, and they will do maneuvers that no 
one can anticipate. We collectively are not ready for that.
    Imagine a situation where China has invented new algorithms 
for military attacks and defense that we cannot even conceive 
of. Remember, I am discussing a world where humans have a 
partner that is smarter than the collection of those people. As 
I said, this will happen in our lifetimes, and it is important 
that we get there first. If you take a look at Ukraine and 
Russia right now, you see the future of war.
    I am assuming, by the way, that China would start by cyber 
attacks and so forth. There is evidence that these new systems 
will be able to come up with zero-day exploits that we cannot 
foresee. A zero-day exploit is something we have never seen 
before and we can't anticipate. There's lots of people who were 
worried that biological attacks can be done, and there is a 
lot--there is a report from the Emerging Biothreats Commission 
this week with the great details, and there is a classified 
version that all of you should take a look at. There is plenty 
of evidence that these things are possible.
    Mr. Guthrie. So Mr. Wang, I see you are shaking your head. 
I only have about 30 seconds, but if you would like to make a 
comment on what he was--that comment.
    Mr. Wang. I agree with Dr. Schmidt that the potential 
implications on national security are incredible. As he 
mentioned, I think the place we are going to see this first is 
in cyber. I think we are going to see agentic cyber warfare in 
which we will see incredibly powerful AI and large-scale data 
centers being utilized to hack into our systems.
    One of the things that we were discussing previously is how 
vulnerable our energy----
    Mr. Guthrie. Thanks. I am at zero on my time, and we are 
going to try to stick to it, so I have to hold myself to that. 
So I appreciate that, and we will get more answers.
    I will yield back and recognize the ranking member for 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Pallone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My questions are of 
Mr. Turk.
    You laid out how important it is that we keep our 
investment environment stable and attractive so AI data 
infrastructure and energy companies can make the large 
investments and America needed to build AI tools in the U.S. 
But unfortunately, the Trump administration is doing the 
opposite. Trump has frozen investments in energy 
infrastructure, is attacking tax credits for energy generation, 
and put in place tariffs that are destroying our economy. And 
don't just take my word for it, others are saying it too.
    So I would ask unanimous consent, Mr. Chairman, to insert 
into the record an article from Politico entitled, ``Why 
Trump's tariff and tax policies could derail efforts to boost 
US power supply,'' if I can.
    Mr. Guthrie. Without objection, so ordered.
    [The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.]
    Mr. Pallone. Thank you.
    So Mr. Turk, can you talk about the harm that some of the 
Trump administration policies will have on our AI 
competitiveness?
    I have to tell you, I would also like to talk about the 
harm that he is doing to our major universities like Columbia, 
but that is for another committee, so I can't ask you that 
today. But tell us about the harm that he is doing to our AI 
competitiveness, if you will.
    Mr. Turk. Well, thanks, Ranking Member Pallone. Let me 
start with the tariffs, just because that is the news of the 
day and the week.
    I can't think, honestly, of a worse policy right now if you 
want to bring on AI power quickly in our country, power for AI 
in our country. Not only is it increasing costs across the 
board for the AI and the data centers itself, but for the power 
that goes into the data centers.
    But it is also injecting an immense amount of uncertainty. 
Folks who are planning data centers don't want uncertainty, 
they want stability of policy so they can plan going forward. 
So I think tariffs is absolutely the worst if you want to bring 
on additional data and additional energy for data centers.
    Secondly, the uncertainty of the incentives, the tax 
incentives, the grants and the loans, all that Congress has 
worked on in recent years, repealing that and even the 
uncertainty of whether provisions are going to be repealed or 
not is also going to have a chilling effect on the investment 
for this power that I think all of our panel here agrees that 
we need to have.
    Mr. Pallone. All right.
    Mr. Turk. We also need to be honest with ourselves. Right 
now, the quickest power, the most affordable power to bring 
onto our grids, including for data centers, is renewables and 
storage: 93 percent in 2025 will be renewables and storage. So 
we need to focus on a wide variety of energy sources.
    I completely agree with folks, but if we want to put 
urgency to it the last thing we need to do is repeal these tax 
credits, grants, loans.
    Mr. Pallone. And then what about--I am going to ask you to 
be quick, if you will, but--because I have a couple of 
questions--what about the repeal of these programs like the 
Inflation Reduction Act that you mentioned that was put in 
place by Democrats, and the tax credits? How is that going to 
make energy more expensive for American families in an era of 
increased energy demand, if you would?
    Mr. Turk. Well, we not only have additional energy demand, 
electricity demand for data centers, we have it for additional 
manufacturing, electrification of buildings. So the demand for 
electricity is going up now when it has been flat for about 15, 
20 years. That puts upward pressure on prices, unless we have 
more supply coming on.
    And so to increase the cost of more supply, more of those 
electrons coming on makes it more expensive for AI data 
centers, but it makes it more expensive for households. I 
mentioned $220 per household, on average, being increased with 
just a couple of those tax provisions being revoked. If you get 
rid of more tax provisions, more grants, more loans, it is just 
going to increase that cost for everybody.
    Mr. Pallone. And what are--lastly, do you agree that we 
need sensible guardrails to ensure that the privacy and 
security of Americans' personal information is not a casualty 
of the rapid development of these AI algorithms and leaky AI 
tools, if you will?
    Mr. Turk. Well, I absolutely agree, and certainly private 
companies, including those represented here, are going to be 
the ones who do this cutting-edge AI and bringing all these 
tools to help humanity.
    But they have a profit motive. They are companies. They are 
trying to make a profit. They don't have expertise. They don't 
have nuclear weapons experts. They don't have biological 
weapons experts.
    We need democracy to step up. That is why I am so happy to 
be in front of you all, a committee that is taking this 
seriously to have a hearing after hearing and really looking to 
have that kind of sensible, thoughtful regulation, that balance 
that the chairman talks about.
    Mr. Pallone. Well, thank you. And I have to say again--I 
don't want to talk about Columbia and universities today 
because it is not in our jurisdiction, but I have to say that, 
you know, cutting all these research money for major 
universities, trying to get rid of--you know, today he 
announced--or yesterday--that he was denying all the visas for 
foreign students at Rutgers University in my district.
    I mean, I see that--we are not going to have--you know, our 
universities aren't going to be able to do the work that is 
necessary to actually keep up competitively with China, and it 
is just really sad. But thank you.
    I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Guthrie. I thank--the gentleman yields back, and the 
Chair recognizes Mr. Latta for 5 minutes for questions.
    Mr. Latta. Well, thanks very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks 
for witnesses for being here. This is extremely important.
    And just a few weeks ago, the head of Nvidia said--and I 
will paraphrase--in order for us to keep the model responsive, 
we have--we now have to compute 10 times faster. The amount of 
computation we have to do is 100 times more, easily. Another 
report had come out saying that in 2024--that said that China 
is looking at about a 94.5 percent--or 94.5 percent gigawatts 
new--of power coming from cogeneration.
    And so what we are seeing is, across everything we have 
been talking about in this committee for quite a while, is that 
we are going to have to have more power.
    And Mr.--Dr. Schmidt, if I could start with you, you said 
something very interesting, something that has been brought up 
in this committee for a good number of years about light-touch 
regulation. And I have heard it from the Internet of Things, 
you name it, that--what we touch in this committee. But could 
you just talk a little bit about, when you talk about the light 
touch, what we have to be doing to make sure we stay 
competitive?
    Dr. Schmidt. The first thing the Government needs to do is 
to make sure the Government understands at the secret and top 
secret level what China is actually doing. So some variation of 
these safety institutes that is at the classified domain that 
allows our Government to understand the details of what our 
opponents are doing is important.
    With respect to the current U.S. companies, all of them are 
very well aware of these issues and are working very hard to 
mitigate them. I am part of a group that actually talks about 
this informally every week, to give you a sense of it. And the 
companies are trying very hard to keep the models safe. Having 
an agreement, for example, where the Government is aware of 
what the companies are doing is probably a good thing. That is 
what I mean by a light touch.
    This innovation, this arrival of this new, alien, 
incredible intelligence will be done by the private sector. I 
want our U.S. Government to understand in detail its 
consequences and help it--and help us be successful as a 
nation.
    Mr. Latta. Let me follow up, because also you talked about, 
you know, we need energy in all forms. A couple of weeks ago in 
our Subcommittee on Energy, we had the RTOs and the ISOs here 
in this country, about seven different ones. They all said this 
exact same thing: We have to have more power, and we shouldn't 
be taking generation offline. Do you agree with that statement 
from all those companies?
    Dr. Schmidt. Well----
    Mr. Latta. Or all the ISOs and RTOs?
    Dr. Schmidt. I don't understand the structure of that part 
of the industry as well as you do, sir. From my perspective, 
the single most important thing to do is to have an all-energy 
strategy. It--as Honorable Turk said, it makes no sense to shut 
down the renewable stuff. We need more renewables. We also need 
more natural gas. We need more of everything. We are not going 
to be able to get the targets of gigawatts that we need without 
doing everything more, right? That includes permitting, as I 
think we have all talked about.
    Mr. Latta. Thank you.
    Mr. Bhatia, you mentioned that we need reliable power, and, 
really, we can't have disruptions out there in it. And, you 
know, one of the issues, again, is we have got to make sure, 
again, with--what the RTOs and the ISOs are all saying is we 
have got to have this power. Do you see us meeting that power's 
need in the very near future?
    Because again, when you are talking about, you know, we 
have to have permitting reform, what is going on in this 
country.
    Mr. Bhatia. You know, I think that we are behind. I think 
that we need to think long term but act now.
    For semiconductor manufacturing, power is essential. It is 
one of the highest input values, and it has incredible impact 
on the stability of the power. The reliability of the power has 
incredible impact on the--our ability to run efficient 
operations and to not have disturbances.
    I mentioned in my prepared testimony that even a fraction 
of a second of power droop--not even loss, not even a second, a 
fraction of a second of power droop--can have tens of millions 
to hundreds of millions of dollars of impact in our fabs. So we 
absolutely need to make sure that we have more power, that 
power--transmission lines are, you know, built for the 21st 
century. And in fact, everywhere where we operate our fabs, 
power reliability is absolutely, you know, at the very top of 
our list when we do site selection.
    Mr. Latta. Well, in my last 37 seconds--because you also 
mentioned we need to cut through that red tape--how would you 
recommend to this committee that we cut through that red tape?
    Mr. Bhatia. Well, I think one of the ways is being sure 
that we reduce the duplicative regulations that are in place 
between Federal and State.
    In, you know, one of our projects in New York right now we 
have to do similar filings in both the Federal and State level, 
even though the State-level regulatory requirements match the 
Federal ones. And so that just, you know, extends the timeline, 
creates more effort, and, you know, creates delays. And I think 
the same thing can be true for many, many different energy 
projects and transmission projects around the country.
    Mr. Latta. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. My time has 
expired right on the button.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you.
    Mr. Latta. And I will also submit my questions, other 
questions, to the witnesses.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentleman yields back, and the 
Chair recognizes the gentlelady from Colorado, Ms. DeGette, for 
5 minutes.
    Ms. DeGette. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, and my 
questions follow very closely on what Mr. Latta was just 
talking about. I want to thank you for having this hearing. We 
had a hearing in the Energy Subcommittee in 2023 about AI and 
energy, and many people hadn't even been thinking about the 
tremendous use of energy by AI up until that time.
    I think that this issue is a really ripe issue for 
bipartisan solutions. However, I am concerned sometimes when we 
talk about cutting red tape or eliminating these proposals, 
sometimes that is a code word for partisanship. But we have 
had--as several people have pointed out, we have had bipartisan 
suggestions. Mr. Peters from this committee has worked on some 
with people from your side of the aisle. They have had them in 
the Senate. So, you know, if we try to--well, if the 
Republicans on this committee try to go this alone, then I 
think this is going to run into trouble, but I think there is 
tremendous potential for us to work on this in a bipartisan 
way.
    I want to talk about an issue, though, that Mr. Pallone 
raised, which is--and also Mr. Turk raised--which is really a 
concerning issue of today, and that is these tariffs. All of 
the witnesses here today can stipulate that we are going to 
need a large increase in all types of energy to not just deal 
with current demands of consumers, but AI. Does anybody 
disagree with that?
    No, no one disagrees with it.
    So Mr. Turk, so if we are going to build more transmission 
infrastructure, we are going to have to have raw materials like 
steel and aluminum. Is that correct?
    Mr. Turk. Yes.
    Ms. DeGette. And if these tariffs actually go into effect, 
which it seems like it might, won't those raw materials needed 
to add transmission capacity be more expensive?
    Mr. Turk. Yes.
    Ms. DeGette. And Mr. Bhatia, just yesterday, in fact, 
Micron announced that they are going to have price increases on 
some products today, starting today doing--due to President 
Trump's tariffs. Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Bhatia. We did--we--you know, memory market is----
    Ms. DeGette. No----
    Mr. Bhatia [continuing]. By many different factors----
    Ms. DeGette. I mean, didn't you announce yesterday that 
Micron is going to impose tariff-related surcharges on some 
products from April 9?
    Mr. Bhatia. The tariffs are an evolving situation, and we 
are communicating with our----
    Ms. DeGette. OK. Well, Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous 
consent to put into the record a Reuters article which says, 
``Micron to impose tariff-related surcharge on some products 
from April 9.''
    Mr. Guthrie. And without objection, so ordered.
    [The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.]
    Ms. DeGette. Thank you.
    Now, Mr.--Dr. Schmidt, you just talked about--and I agree 
with you--that we need more energy in all forms, and that is--
and also, that is likely the way that this market is going to 
develop. Is that right?
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes, correct.
    Ms. DeGette. So when people say, ``Oh, we need to drill, 
baby, drill,'' that--we do need natural gas, but we also need 
to make sure that we can upgrade our grid to deal with the 
renewable energy that is inevitably going to be a part of this 
process. Is that right?
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes. Yes, ma'am.
    Ms. DeGette. Now, so Mr. Turk, I want to ask you: Without 
guardrails, how is it that we are going to be able--without 
guardrails that protect consumers, how is it we are going to be 
able to develop centers, data centers for AI, at the same time 
we can ensure average Americans can get the electricity that 
they need at decent prices?
    Mr. Turk. Well, I think we need to do two things at the 
same time. We need to bring on those electrons as quickly as we 
can, including to streamline permitting but to do it on a 
bipartisan basis. Bipartisan means durable. It means making 
sure things work, actually, in the real world.
    And then secondly, we do need to have the guardrails. With 
all due respect to the other witnesses, we got phenomenal 
talent in the U.S. We are lucky to have that talent working on 
AI. But we also need to have the Government step up. We need to 
have sensible, thoughtful guardrails to protect everyone's 
privacy. That is your jobs.
    Ms. DeGette. And if we don't have those guardrails, what is 
going to go--what is going to happen for energy prices for 
consumers?
    Mr. Turk. Well, energy prices will go through the roof and 
we will lose trust for AI by the American people as well, which 
isn't going to help our competition with China either.
    Ms. DeGette. Thank you.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Hudson for 5 minutes for questions.
    Mr. Hudson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank 
you for holding this very important hearing today. This topic 
is crucial to future generations in ensuring the resources for 
healthcare facilities, banks, universities, our national 
security, including our warfighters.
    I thank the witnesses for your very important testimony, it 
is very informative. The bottom line is we must maintain our 
place as a global leader on AI, and I think we can all agree on 
that.
    North Carolina, where I live, is a State that leads in 
innovation, and that includes in AI. There is no doubt we will 
continue to incorporate AI in many of our industries, but we 
must ensure we have the resources necessary to advance and 
sustain AI. I represent Fort Bragg. We call it the epicenter of 
the universe, home of the Airborne and Special Forces. At Fort 
Bragg we use AI. AI benefits the warfighter by anticipating 
what is next, adjusting to situations, and connecting our 
soldiers.
    It is absolutely critical to our national security that we 
stay ahead of our near-peer adversaries, particularly China, so 
that we maintain our superior advantage. I never want my guys 
and gals in a fair fight, I want us to be the leader. And I 
certainly don't want us to face a near-peer adversary that has 
a superior AI technology.
    I have also seen threats to our energy sources, whether it 
is the rolling brownouts we saw in California but also 
including when two substations in my district were attacked in 
my home county, causing a multiday power loss. Nearly 4,000 
people were without power for almost a week. Hospitals faced 
blackouts, schools and businesses closed, restaurants and 
grocery stores lost their inventory, stop lights were dark, 
cell signals went down. Even gas stations had to close. One of 
my constituents lost her life.
    Disruptions to our energy supply are dangerous, and an 
attack like this has big implications on our future AI 
capabilities. The threat only grows as AI is further 
incorporated in our everyday lives. I would ask--I will start 
with Mr. Wang, but if anyone else wants to, jump in--can you 
please share, from your opinion, how an unreliable or a 
nonresilient grid would impact investing--investment planning 
and existing commercial activities?
    Mr. Wang. First of all, I want to just echo many of your 
statements. They are spot on. First of all, we need advanced AI 
for our national security. We need our Department of Defense, 
our warfighter, to have advanced AI capabilities. That is 
absolutely critical for this next phase. And that is dependent 
on energy, as we have discussed here in the--over the course of 
today.
    One of the greatest risks--if you think about the training 
of these large-scale AI systems, it requires a continuous 
source of power to be able to both train advanced AI systems 
and keep them running. If we have an unreliable energy grid in 
any sort of, you know, competitive or conflict scenario, if the 
adversaries have the ability to take down our grid through 
cyber attacks or other forms of attacks, then that greatly 
impacts our ability to be competitive or to be able to fight in 
that battle. So it is absolutely critical we have a reliable 
energy grid. It is important that we secure this energy grid. 
It is important that we are able to protect against cyber 
attacks and other forms of attacks and we have consistent 
power.
    Mr. Hudson. Does anybody else want to weigh in?
    Mr. Bhatia?
    Mr. Bhatia. I think that, you know, the President, as well 
as Congress, is behind the strong growth in manufacturing 
across many different sectors, including semiconductors. And 
energy has always been an advantage for this country, due to, 
you know, abundant natural resources. And we have invested in 
all different technologies over time, and that has just stalled 
over the last 10, 15 years, as some of the other panelists 
noted.
    And so I absolutely believe that investing in energy is 
going to help to fuel this manufacturing renaissance, and in 
particular the semiconductor renaissance that, you know, we all 
know is so important to winning in AI.
    AI, you know, just to co-opt some of the words of Mr. Wang 
on the panel here, you know, it is about data. And data needs 
memory chips, and it needs the most advanced memory chips in 
order to be able to create all of the insights that are 
valuable in whatever circumstance or application that we see.
    Mr. Hudson. Well, thank you for your answers.
    Mr. Turk?
    Mr. Turk. Just--Congressman, if I could just say a word on 
grid, and I am just so pleased you mentioned the grid, it is 
just such a fundamental backbone of our infrastructure--for 
military bases, but for everybody else in industry.
    This is where I think it is so important to have all the 
tools in the tool belt. You all provided through the bipartisan 
infrastructure legislation $10.5 billion to improve our grid 
through a program called the GRIP program. We have $23 billion 
in our loan program right now, with a whole bunch more in the 
pipeline to help utilities to strengthen the grid going 
forward. That is what I am talking about of keeping all these 
tools in the tool belt.
    Mr. Hudson. Thanks, I appreciate that.
    Mr. Chairman, my time has expired, so I will yield back, 
but thank you to the witnesses for those answers.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The Chair will--the gentleman 
yields back, the Chair recognizes Ms. Schakowsky for 5 minutes 
for questions.
    Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you so much.
    Mr. Turk, I want to--did I do that wrong?
    No? OK.
    I have questions for you. Some go way back. We are talking 
about AI today, but I have to tell you that I and Gus Bilirakis 
on the Republican side have been working on the issue of 
privacy for a very, very long time, and even more before that 
with--in all kinds of tech interests. But we have never done 
anything to rein in Big Tech, nothing whatsoever. So we see 
families that have to give all kinds of information, which they 
do, all kinds of, I think, risks that go on.
    So, of course, we are talking about AI. But in the 
meantime, we have seen tech leaders apologize to consumers: 
``Oh, we didn't mean to put children at risk, we didn't mean to 
do this or that, and yet we have done nothing at all.'' So what 
it seems to me is now we are talking about AI, and you talk 
about risk. You used that word, ``risk.'' So do we have to go 
back further, or let's--we--if you want to just talk about risk 
with AI, what exactly are we talking about?
    You mentioned that in your written statement, but I would 
like to know who--and we can start with how do we address the 
issue of risk? But who should be addressing the issue of risk?
    Mr. Turk. Well, thank you, Congresswoman, for that 
question, and thank you for your focus on these issues for 
years and years. Your leadership has just been tremendous.
    I completely agree with something Dr. Schmidt said at the 
beginning in his opening statement about AI being underhyped, 
if anything. This is an incredibly powerful technology. What 
that means to me is--and I have had the chance to work with a 
lot of our experts in the Government, and we need to make sure 
that we keep those experts in the Government, we need more AI 
experts in the Government, not letting AI experts leave, which 
gives me concern with some of the firings and some of the other 
things that this administration, the Trump administration, is 
doing--but powerful technologies can not only be used for good. 
Powerful technologies, especially in terrorist hands, in rogue 
states' hands and other hands, once you get these models out 
there, it is incredibly difficult to bring them back in.
    So I will give you a specific example of a risk. And I know 
this is an unclassified setting, so I will just talk a bit in 
generalities. As smart as the folks are who work in Scale AI 
and OpenAI and Google and Meta and these other big tech 
companies, they are not nuclear weapons experts, nor should 
they be. I am not sure why you would be a nuclear weapons 
expert--and Mr. Wang mentioned his parents working at Los 
Alamos, which is just a phenomenal lab for us in our country.
    We need to make sure that, before a model goes out there in 
the public, that there is some red teaming, there is some 
vetting by nuclear weapons experts to know what to look for, to 
make sure that terrorists can't take these models and help them 
develop nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical 
weapons. That is where I think they are--just as you suggest, 
it is who and how.
    The private sector will need to lead. They have an 
incentive to make sure that their models are safe, but they 
don't have all the expertise they need to red team and make 
sure that those models are safe.
    I would prefer that not to just be a voluntary kind of 
understanding. I think it should be a requirement that, before 
models come out, there needs to be some vetting. Now, that has 
to be done efficiently. It has to have the right balance that 
the chairman is talking about to make sure that the broad 
expertise that we have--the nuclear weapons experts, the chem 
weapons experts--are poking and prodding and making sure that 
these models aren't going to cause us harm. So that is one 
particular example.
    The other one that you mentioned, which I think is 
incredibly important as well, is privacy and making sure that 
information is not sucked up inappropriately to go into these 
AI models in the first place, and that these models aren't 
going to infringe on the privacy. I absolutely think consumers, 
citizens, Americans should control their information, and we 
should have guardrails. We should have regulations in place to 
ensure that that is the case. Again, this should be thoughtful, 
this should be efficient, this should be in a way that allows 
our companies to push the boundaries.
    I completely agree with everyone who has spoken that we 
need to win this AI race, but we need to do this thoughtfully 
and make sure that the democracy, the people's representatives, 
have some say here too.
    Ms. Schakowsky. So as part of the who, you are saying that 
the Congress of the United States should play a role?
    Mr. Turk. Absolutely. That is why I am so pleased that this 
committee is having multiple hearings, not just one-offs.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you.
    Ms. Schakowsky. Well, thank you so much, I appreciate it.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentlelady yields back. The 
Chair recognizes Mr. Bilirakis for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Bilirakis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate it. 
Thanks for holding the hearing. I thank the presenters.
    Mr. Wang, to win the race against China, American AI 
companies need to succeed at home and abroad. However, we have 
seen our largest foreign trade partners, especially the EU, 
enact sweeping new AI data regulations that could be used to 
target U.S. companies. How can we address new and emerging 
digital trade barriers to ensure American AI companies can 
outcompete their Chinese competitors, again, on an even playing 
field?
    Mr. Wang. Thank you for the question.
    You know, it is certainly true that China, in particular, 
and the Chinese Communist Party has a strategy to win on data. 
This includes some of the things that you mentioned around, you 
know, being more loose around data privacy both domestically 
and internationally, as well as explicit programs that they 
have within their country to create tax incentives, you know, 
vouchers and other forms of large-scale government programs to 
win on data. That is why I actually think it is critical in the 
United States that we focus on exporting our technology 
globally, as well as exporting our standards globally.
    So one of the avenues that we have as a country to be able 
to do this is through NIST. You know, as the United States we 
have an opportunity to really define what are the standards for 
AI that will be adopted globally. And other countries are 
listening, and they--you know, through the global network of AI 
safety institutes, there is a global coalition of countries who 
are looking to us to help define what are the standards for 
safety and other provisions that they will--that we will all 
collectively utilize to define how we govern AI in the future. 
So we have a golden opportunity as a country to help set the 
global AI standards, and we need to take that and be very 
thoughtful about what we present.
    Mr. Bilirakis. Thank you.
    Mr. Schmidt--Dr. Schmidt, we have seen Chinese AI 
companies, DeepSeek, Alibaba, and now Manus AI debut powerful 
AI models in the past 2 months. Many are rightfully focused on 
these models' capabilities. But I am also concerned about how 
they were trained, potentially on Americans' personal data and 
by misusing access to American AI services.
    We should also be cautious about how Chinese AI will be 
used by American consumers and in potentially sensitive areas 
of the U.S. economy, such as healthcare. And I am very 
interested in that. We should act now, before China has a 
foothold on these emerging markets and controls AI data outputs 
to Americans' queries.
    What steps can we take to address these risks to American 
consumers and businesses?
    And first I want to talk to Dr.--if Dr. Schmidt can answer, 
and then if anyone else wants to chime in and I have some time, 
please don't hesitate.
    Dr. Schmidt. Not only is your question great, it is worse 
than you said. Sorry.
    The Chinese models are released in open source, which means 
that you can see how they work, and they are easily spread, and 
they are free. It is highly likely that the U.S. companies will 
be, by the time we are done, pretty well regulated by you all 
because of the importance of what they are doing. This is my 
personal opinion. I am not calling for it, but I think that is 
what is going to happen. It is very hard to regulate the open 
source movement coming out of China. We need to make sure we 
deal with that.
    The industry is struggling with your question because we 
have not figured out a way to deal with what is called 
distillation, where--and distillation is where you take one 
model and you ask it questions, and you get the answers. And 
the--there's lots of evidence that the Chinese did exactly what 
you said in your question using this distillation mechanism, so 
we don't really know.
    My own view is that the best answer is more offense, not 
more defense. And simply invest, invest, invest to stay ahead. 
In order to invest, as I mentioned in my opening statement, we 
need high skills immigration of key people because these things 
are essentially math problems. We need all the energy that we 
discussed.
    I think the American innovation system, which is the 
combination of the government, the venture capital industry, 
the private sector, and universities is phenomenal. It is 
important we not in any way slow down the universities in AI 
research.
    We can win this. It has to be an all-country effort. I am--
my personal view is it is a national security issue for America 
against China.
    Mr. Bilirakis. Agreed, agreed. Yes, I don't have any more 
time left, so I will yield back.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentleman yields back. The 
Chair recognizes Ms. Matsui for 5 minutes for questions.
    Ms. Matsui. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 
thank all the witnesses for being here today. This is a 
critically important issue for the future of America and, 
really, for the future of humanity at large.
    Now, as coauthor of the original CHIPS Act, I know how 
critical this policy is to strengthen our national security and 
technological leadership. The CHIPS and Science Act is working 
as intended, leveraging its $50 billion of Government funding 
to spur a ninefold investment of $450 billion from the 
semiconductor industry. Yet President Trump threatened to 
abandon this once-in-a-generation effort to bring advanced 
semiconductor manufacturing back to America, and his tariffs 
are driving up costs to what we need to be competitive in AI, 
including aluminum, steel, semiconductors, and electronics. 
This administration's chaos and uncertainty will harm our AI 
leadership.
    Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Bhatia, how would dismantling or 
delaying the CHIPS and Science Act programs impact America's 
global competitiveness, especially in AI innovation?
    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you, Congresswoman Matsui, for your 
support of the CHIPS Act and our industry over your entire 
career.
    We are the only U.S. memory company, and our investments 
are--you know, bring tremendous value across leading-edge 
memory solutions, as well as across other industry--other 
segments like the automotive industry, aerospace, defense. So 
we believe our investments and our more than $100 billion plan 
over the next 20 years will bring tremendous value, and we are 
actually encouraged by the Executive order to create an 
accelerator program for large-scale projects through the CHIPS 
office, through the Department of Commerce to be able to ensure 
that our projects----
    Ms. Matsui. So you don't want any slowing down, right, no 
pausing.
    Mr. Bhatia. That is right, that is right. I think the 
accelerator's goal is to be able to make sure that the projects 
can be successful.
    Ms. Matsui. Dr. Schmidt?
    Dr. Schmidt. A number of us were very strong supporters of 
your legislation for the following reason. Twenty-five years 
ago we made a mistake, as a country, and we got out of this 
business. It costs money to get back into it. It costs money to 
build the factories, to train the people, and so forth. Ten 
billion of the 50 billion is in new R&D for new kinds of 
packaging, which will give America a possibility of leading 
globally in semiconductors. The other 40 is to allow us to have 
domestic production.
    Why do we need domestic production? Think national 
security. Just think about it. It is worth it to our Nation to 
have a supply chain of critical intelligence materials. That is 
literally the things that do the thinking under your control, 
Congresswoman.
    Ms. Matsui. OK.
    Dr. Schmidt. Thank you.
    Ms. Matsui. And Dr. Schmidt, I read your testimony. I was 
very impressed with it, particularly the part about our 
innovation power, the potent collaboration between government, 
private industry, and academia. The Government, you know, 
really provides the strategic direction, and the private sector 
driving innovation, and academia, which fuels a pipeline of 
foundational research and talent.
    I was wondering. You know, I think it is great to have this 
collaboration, but I am wondering because the Trump 
administration claims they are committed to American dominance, 
yet time and again their actions show the opposite. We should 
be training and recruiting talent to shape our AI leadership. 
Instead, more than 75 percent of U.S. researchers surveyed are 
considering leaving our country because of the chaos of the 
Trump administration. President Trump is firing experts in our 
agency, waging a war against science, and destroying our public 
research funding system.
    Mr. Turk, this dismantling of public research and 
reductions in the Federal workforce consistent with--is it 
consistent with strengthening U.S. leadership on AI and other 
emerging technologies?
    Mr. Turk. I think it is absolutely inconsistent. I think 
this is a huge threat going on right now, hollowing out the 
expertise in our national government, and I certainly got a 
chance to work with phenomenal experts, civil servants in our 
Department of Energy. We built that institution up for years 
and years, that kind of talent at our national labs. And to be 
haphazardly and chaotically firing people, losing that talent 
at the exact time that we need it, given the global competition 
we have got in AI and all these other critical technology 
areas--so I think it is exactly the wrong approach.
    Ms. Matsui. OK. There are other energy technologies the 
Republicans have historically supported. The Bipartisan 
Infrastructure Law--we created the Office of Clean Energy 
Demonstrations to help develop advanced nuclear, hydrogen, 
carbon capture, and long-duration energy storage. Mr. Turk, 
what is happening to the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations 
under President Trump?
    Mr. Turk. So it is one of the offices that has been 
decimated the worst. And you just mentioned----
    Mr. Guthrie. I am sorry----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. The incredibly important areas that 
they are working on. Funding that has been provided----
    Mr. Guthrie. We need----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. On a bipartisan basis from Congress.
    Mr. Guthrie. The time----
    Mr. Turk. And to see that being dismantled is just a 
travesty.
    Mr. Guthrie. We have to move on.
    Ms. Matsui. My time has--I have other questions I will 
submit for the record.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. I thank--the gentlelady yields 
back. The Chair recognizes Mr. Palmer for 5 minutes for 
questions.
    Mr. Palmer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Dr. Schmidt, I read your book, and I have--one of my 
favorite quotes is from Henry Kissinger. He said the absence of 
alternatives clears the mind marvelously. I say it another way: 
Nothing brings clarity and focus quite so well as the absence 
of alternatives.
    My concern is that we are in an arms race with China for 
artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and that if 
China wins that race they will not be a superpower, they will 
be the superpower.
    I also continue to point out in this committee that there 
is not a single major refinery for rare earth elements in the 
Western Hemisphere. There's only nine in the world; eight are 
in China, the other one is in Malaysia. And I just want to ask 
you, Do you think this ought to be one of those moments of 
clarity that focuses Congress on meeting these demands, these 
needs?
    Dr. Schmidt. Thank you, and I do.
    If I told you with certainty that in 5 years China will be 
able to mount cyber attacks against American infrastructure 
that we have no defense of, would you act now? Yes.
    Mr. Palmer. Absolutely.
    Dr. Schmidt. If I told you that China was building an 
architecture for national security that was autonomous, 
robotic, attritable, et cetera, would you act now? Yes, you 
would.
    I am telling you those now.
    Mr. Palmer. So if we don't act on the mining, processing, 
and refining of rare earth elements immediately, we could find 
ourselves in the very position you just described.
    Dr. Schmidt. That is correct. We want full control of our 
own supply chain.
    Mr. Palmer. Absolutely.
    Dr. Schmidt. Energy, chips, the infrastructure that we 
need. It is an issue of national security for America.
    Mr. Palmer. Mr. Wang, in order to meet the demands that we 
have for power generation, what--how--what power generation 
capacity do we need to have to achieve dominance in AI and 
quantum computing? Do you have any idea of what that would be?
    Mr. Wang. Well, as was mentioned earlier, the scale of data 
centers that are being built require similar amounts of power 
as entire cities----
    Mr. Palmer. OK.
    Mr. Wang [continuing]. In the United States.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, Dr. Schmidt, I don't--you probably don't 
remember this. At the dinner at the Library of Congress, you 
and I had a brief discussion. One of the things that I continue 
to point out in this committee and other places is that there's 
100, 200 hydrocarbon power generation facilities that have been 
shuttered and dismantled.
    We know that we have these enormous power demands. I know 
there is a move now to go back to opening these back up on 
natural gas and coal. But what do you think about using small 
modular reactors to locate them on these facilities to meet--it 
is the quickest way, I think, to meet these power demands.
    And the good part of this is, with all due respect to my 
Democratic colleagues, we are not going to do it with 
renewables because we just don't have the time to build out 
everything you have to build out, including the transmission 
lines. Those transmission lines still exist at these shuttered 
power plants. We could literally--we could open them with coal 
or natural gas, but I think we ought to be thinking about small 
modular reactors that can plug into the existing transmission 
lines. How would you respond to that?
    Dr. Schmidt. One of my personal frustrations is the 
regulatory structure around nuclear NSMRs. SMRs are the right 
answer, so your instincts are exactly correct. Furthermore, 
they can be built in volume. How many SMRs are in use in 
America today? Zero.
    Mr. Palmer. Zero.
    Dr. Schmidt. How many--what is the most promising one? An 
initiative in Canada. Why----
    Mr. Palmer. And I am glad you brought that up, because they 
just licensed it, what, 2 days ago, or a week ago.
    Dr. Schmidt. And the typical supply--the ``fast'' approval 
time is considered to be 12 years. That defies logic. We need a 
new program around much faster permitting for safer and safer 
fission and fusion nuclear. SMRs are the correct path.
    One of the issues that is--sorry for the details--is 30 
years ago or 40 years ago, when--the standard for permitting in 
nuclear was set at a threshold below natural radiation. Alex 
can talk about this with great detail more than I can. At the 
end of the day, it was set too hard. It was a mistake. It needs 
to be fixed.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, the GE Hitachi--and I am not taking sides 
for any brand--it could be built in about 3 years.
    But you made another point there that I think is very 
important for this committee, and that is the economy of scale. 
If we were committed to building these out in scale, so much of 
it can be done in factories, so much of the testing can be done 
in a factory and then on site.
    I think it is extremely important that this Government move 
toward small modular reactors to meet the power demands that we 
have to have to even be competitive with China in the AI space.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Castor for 5 minutes for questions.
    Ms. Castor. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a very 
important topic, and we should be focused on bipartisan 
solutions to advance American innovation.
    The problem is there are so many new roadblocks right now, 
and President Trump has turned himself into the anti-innovation 
president. He is--has outright killed large new energy 
resources that were in line to come onto the grid. He has 
imposed these new import taxes and tariffs on everything we 
need to compete on AI: aluminum, steel, semiconductors, 
electronics. He is threatening to halt our investment in 
semiconductors in America. He is--has taken a hatchet to the 
academic and scientific workforce. This is all a gift to China 
at exactly the wrong time.
    But let's focus in on the challenges and the opportunities 
for energy and AI. Secretary Turk, it is good to see you. One 
of the challenges is the enormous need for new energy capacity, 
but I am very concerned for what this means for everyday 
Americans and their electric bills there.
    Mr. Chairman, I am going to offer--ask unanimous consent to 
submit for the record a new study from the Environmental and 
Energy Law Program out of Harvard Law School, where they 
highlight--they say they are skeptical of utility claims that 
data center energy costs are isolated from other consumers' 
bills. Rate structures, as well as secret contracts could be 
transferring Big Tech's energy costs to the public. How do we 
balance----
    Mr. Guthrie. Without objection, so ordered.\1\
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    \1\ The report has been retained in committee files and is included 
in the Documents for the Record at https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/
IF00/20250409/118133/HHRG-119-IF00-20250409-SD095.pdf.
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    Ms. Castor. Thank you.
    How do we balance these needs?
    Mr. Turk. So I think we have to, as I said in my opening 
statement, bring power on the grid--it could be behind the 
meter, as well--to power data centers, to power AI cutting-edge 
models.
    We also need to make sure we have downward pressure on 
prices. I don't know of any elected official anywhere in our 
country who shouldn't have affordability and the cost to 
consumers as job one, and everything seen through that lens. As 
you suggest, it doesn't seem like that is what the President--
our President right now--has in mind.
    So even contemplating repealing the tax credits that puts 
downward pressure on prices across the board--technology 
neutral, right? Any technology can qualify for those tax 
credits if it meets certain thresholds. Getting rid of those is 
exactly the wrong thing to do right now.
    And I mentioned the analysis that has been done, a number 
of groups have done really good, cutting-edge analysis: $220 
more annually each and every year for an average household. 
Now, that goes up in some States to $400 more a year. If you 
happen to represent Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, New York, Iowa, 
and Kansas, watch out, it is $400 more per year just to repeal 
two of the tax credits, let alone the full panoply of what has 
been done.
    Ms. Castor. Yes, thanks.
    So one of the opportunities, however, is to work together 
on a much more efficient and modern electric grid across the 
country. It is kind of outdated, the way everything is 
structured and--right now. That is why yesterday I introduced 
my Advancing Grid Enhancing Technologies Act with Senators 
Welch and King that will implement shared savings incentives 
that promote the deployment of grid-enhancing technologies. 
That is the cheapest way to supercharge our grid. We have got 
to optimize the existing grid infrastructure to bring energy 
projects online more quickly and save consumers billions of 
dollars.
    Do you see hope here with our--with modernization of the 
grid and GETs?
    Mr. Turk. Well, thank you for your leadership, and thank 
you for focusing on GETs, grid-enhancing technologies.
    We have got such a range of technologies. Some we still 
need to reduce costs, but some, like GETs and reconductoring, 
make sense. We just don't have a utility industry now and the 
incentives for those technologies to be utilized at scale, to 
allow us to get more out of our existing grid.
    We of course need to build new transmission, as well, in 
our country to make sure that we are prepared for what we need 
in the future. So I am really pleased and thankful for your 
leadership in that area.
    I am also firmly one--and I agree with Dr. Schmidt and 
others--that Congressman Palmer was just talking about, small 
modular reactors. I think small modular reactors--I think we 
should be investing now in fusion so we have that as a 
solution.
    Enhanced geothermal is such a phenomenal resource in our 
country, taking advantage of the drilling expertise in the 
workers to drill 24/7 clean power, including for data centers. 
We should be investing even more now to try to bring that 
technology online very quickly.
    Ms. Castor. Thank you.
    I yield back my time.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentlelady yields back. The 
Chair recognizes Dr. Dunn from Florida for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Dunn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. So exciting 
topics, from tech startups to energy, grid operators, internet 
service providers. Everybody is working to develop these new AI 
technologies, and America has always been at the forefront of 
technological innovation.
    But with AI, we are just not. We are not untouchable. We 
have competition. We are in a race with China to lead in this 
field.
    And it is promising to have two major American companies 
sitting before us today, Scale AI and Micron, who are leading 
the way. This global AI boom has prompted widespread industry 
adoption across all kinds of sectors. Healthcare is one of keen 
interest to me, but also finance, telecom, weather. This 
morning I met with NOAA. They are excited.
    However, this exponential growth of demand brings it with 
some substantial energy requirements. And as AI models grow in 
size and complexity, so does the infrastructure required to 
train and operate them. For instance, training large language 
models can take weeks of processing and high-powered GPUs, and 
the energy consumption can be staggering. At the same time, our 
telecoms infrastructure has to keep up with AI's growing 
demands. High-capacity networks are essential to ensure fast 
data transfers in these real-time AI applications such as 
autonomous driving, telemedicine, and smart cities and whatnot.
    As AI use grows, both the energy consumption and telecom's 
capacity required will grow commensurately with it. At the same 
time, the Chinese Communist Party is moving fast and hard with 
zero regulations and zero ethical restraints, so we have our 
work cut out for us.
    I also sit on the China--Select China Committee and the 
NATO Parliament, and I had a chance to discuss these issues 
with our European counterparts. And I met with the member of 
the European Parliament who led the current EU privacy bill. 
And she cautioned me, ``Whatever you do in Congress, don't do 
that. Don't do what we did. Don't do what we did.'' That was 
her words kind of from a--right from the horse's mouth, if you 
will. The expert witnesses here, I think, understand today that 
the EU bill has indeed restricted artificial intelligence 
development in Europe.
    With that, Mr. Schmidt, as these AI tools develop, their 
utility to each of us will be proportionate to their--our 
ability to access them. With that in mind, are we moving 
quickly enough to enable the deployment of broadband 
connectivity and commercial access to spectrum, Mr. Schmidt?
    Dr. Schmidt. On the spectrum side we need another round of 
a spectrum analysis and a new way in which the unused spectrum 
is allocated. I happen to believe in a situation where 
companies are able to buy the spectrum but they have to build 
it out, or they are given the spectrum and they have to build 
it out. I don't want people sitting on spectrum and not making 
it use. We need that bandwidth. However you all arrange that, 
it will be fine with us, I think.
    Mr. Dunn. Well, it is trickier than you think, but thank 
you for that. I am pleased that this--our members of that 
committee are sitting here with us today.
    Mr. Wang, it is good to see you again here in Washington. 
You are becoming a regular up here. I fear for your soul.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Wang. Today cutting-edge AI research is dominated by 
industry, partially due to the very high costs of computing 
needed to train these advanced models. Given the fast pace of 
the progress, how can we ensure our government or our pilot 
programs keep up with the rapidly evolving industry needs and 
standards?
    Mr. Wang. I think that the most useful framework here is to 
just think about what are the raw ingredients for these AI 
models. So it boils down to three major elements: computational 
power, which requires a lot of energy, as we have discussed a 
lot today; algorithms, the sort of instructions for the models, 
and that requires incredible talent to devise new algorithms; 
and then data.
    And oftentimes we really--and really, these AI models and 
progress in AI models boils down to progress in every one of 
these three underlying components. Oftentimes we don't consider 
enough our relative position on data with respect to the 
Chinese Communist Party. They have had a decadelong strategy to 
be dominant in data, to win on data. They have large-scale 
government programs. They have built their entire system and 
their entire country, their sort of civil-military fusion 
system, to be dominant on data.
    And we need to begin thinking as strategically on this 
front as well. We need a program, and we need thought around 
how we achieve data dominance as a country, how we utilize all 
of the incredible data that we have as a country to get out 
ahead. And our Government is one of the largest producers of 
data, and we need to leverage this advantage.
    Mr. Dunn. And do you think having a privacy law would help 
that? I mean a standardized privacy rule for the country.
    Mr. Wang. I definitely want to prevent this--the case where 
we have a patchwork of privacy laws--
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman----
    Mr. Wang [continuing]. Across every State in the----
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman is out of time. I am sorry.
    Mr. Dunn. OK. Just on that, sort of on the----
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman is out of time.
    Mr. Dunn. Mr. Bhatia, a similar question.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields----
    Mr. Dunn. Coincidentally, the European----
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman is out of time, I am sorry, I am 
sorry.
    Mr. Dunn [continuing]. Announced yesterday----
    Mr. Guthrie. I am sorry, you are out of time.
    Mr. Dunn. I am out of time.
    Mr. Guthrie. I am sorry.
    Mr. Dunn. God, that one flew fast.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields back.
    Mr. Dunn. I was having fun.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Guthrie. It does go fast, doesn't it?
    Mr. Dunn. All right.
    Mr. Guthrie. And Mr. Tonko----
    Mr. Dunn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman--
    Mr. Guthrie [continuing]. Is recognized for 5 minutes. 
Mr.----
    Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me begin by 
acknowledging that just about every witness who has testified 
at the Energy Subcommittee this year, whether by invitation of 
Republican or Democrat, has agreed that we must make it easier 
to build transmission infrastructure to meet our Nation's 
growing energy demands and to be the global leader in AI. 
Today's witnesses are no exception, so I really hope this is an 
issue that the committee can get serious about.
    Dr. Schmidt, your testimony mentioned building more 
transmission, but you also called out the need to embrace small 
grid capabilities and grid-enhancing technologies. Why is it 
important to maximize our existing electricity system's 
efficiency and performance while we also work to build new 
infrastructure?
    Dr. Schmidt. One of the ways to think about the energy 
problem is that you are building things that last 40 years and 
that you are in a constant process of renewing things that were 
built 40 years ago. And in that sense we need an integrated 
plan to upgrade everything.
    I like what the Honorable Turk said, that you need all of 
it. My list was fusion, fission, especially SMRs, and enhanced 
geothermal, natural gas, renewable wind, and solar. We need all 
of it. In order to do that, the grid has to be more dynamic.
    You want to have the source of power be as close as 
possible to the consumer. The ideal scenario is you put your 
power plant next to your data center. The data centers need 5 
gigawatts. They are huge, right? You need 5 gigawatts of power, 
which is also huge. We can't do that. Therefore, we need to 
have the transmission to get them from one to the other.
    Mr. Tonko. Thank you. I appreciate that.
    And, Mr. Turk, your thoughts on this. If we can make some 
existing loads more flexible through demand response programs 
or deploy grid-enhancing technologies to get more out of our 
existing infrastructure, are these important tools to create 
the energy system conditions needed to win the race for global 
AI leadership?
    Mr. Turk. Well, I think they are absolutely indispensable, 
and there are no regrets, as well. Just as Dr. Schmidt was 
talking about, why wouldn't we take advantage? And I know you 
have been a leader on this for years in the Congress. Why 
wouldn't we take advantage of that infrastructure that we have 
built? Infrastructure is one of those things that is going to 
be around 40 years or even more. Let's get the most out of it.
    And we do have technologies these days, GETs technologies, 
reconductoring, using AI, using machine learning to help the 
grids balance loads a lot quicker. We started a program at the 
Department of Energy to use AI for permitting to make sure that 
we could do more permitting, including on transmission, to 
build out our transmission system even more quickly than we 
have been doing. It is a big challenge, but we have got to use 
all the tools.
    Mr. Tonko. Thank you, both of you gentlemen.
    And Mr. Bhatia, I want to first and foremost welcome you to 
upstate New York. I also want to thank you and recognize the 
important commitments that Micron has made to upstate New York. 
Today we are talking a lot about how we can build and operate 
our energy system to meet AI's needs, but we rarely talk about 
how AI and its enabling technologies can be developed to better 
fit within the reasonably foreseeable constraints of our 
system. And that is why it is critically important that we 
continue to invest in research.
    So Mr. Bhatia, your testimony mentioned that Micron is 
developing chips with much more improved energy efficiency. Can 
you discuss why this is a priority for Micron, and how 
important is a chip's energy efficiency to reduce the overall 
energy demands of these data centers?
    Mr. Bhatia. Certainly. Thank you for your comments, 
Congressman.
    And, you know, I really believe the semiconductor industry 
and memory chips are part of the solution. You know, the 
brilliance of Moore's Law, which is the governing law for the 
industry over the last--well, since its, you know, inception 
50-plus years ago, is that with every generation of technology 
that we introduce, 18--every 18 to 24 months, we are taking the 
same operation and doing it with higher performance, lower 
power, and less resources utilized to build that device, 
whether--in our case memory, cells. And so that scaling path by 
itself is part of the solution to being able to make all these 
tremendous AI innovations, these data-driven AI innovations 
come to life using lower and lower power as we progress through 
time.
    And Micron has actually been very focused on leadership in 
that way. For the last four DRAM generations, Micron has been 
first to market by several quarters, ahead of our Asian 
competitors. And that allows us to build chips that are lower-
powered than those competitors. So for example, I mentioned in 
my prepared remarks that every one Nvidia GPU has 96 high 
bandwidth memory chips integrated with it. Our high bandwidth 
memory chips are 30 percent lower power, 30 percent lower power 
than our competitor's chips that go into those similar systems.
    So absolutely critical for us, and we look for all avenues 
to be able to continue to reduce power as we scale down the 
trajectory and improve the efficiency of our chips, including--
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you.
    Mr. Bhatia [continuing]. Partnering with national labs----
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you, the time----
    Mr. Bhatia [continuing]. To do research with----
    Mr. Guthrie. The time is expired, thank you.
    Mr. Tonko. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank 
you for the comments from----
    Mr. Guthrie. I appreciate----
    Mr. Tonko [continuing]. The witnesses.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields----
    Mr. Tonko. I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie [continuing]. Back, thank you, and the Chair 
recognizes Dr. Joyce for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Joyce. First I want to thank Chairman Guthrie for 
holding this critical hearing on the future of artificial 
intelligence.
    AI is the defining technology of the next several decades. 
It will have a revolutionary effect on all aspects of our 
lives. It will be integral in everything, from the high-level 
data analysis to the use of a search engine. In industries as 
diverse as energy production and healthcare, AI is already 
making significant inroads.
    As a doctor, we see AI integrated into innovative medical 
devices, helping to translate the information collected by the 
device into clinical guidance. In medical practices, AI can 
help streamline the administrative tasks, allowing doctors to 
ultimately spend more time with their patients. This is just 
the beginning of the capabilities that AI will give us, and it 
is why it is critical that the U.S. leads the way in the 
development and the deployment of this technology, just like 
the Space Race during the Cold War.
    However, our geopolitical rival is striving to catch up and 
overtake America so that they can dominate this new sector. 
Make no mistake, China is desperate to beat us in the field of 
AI. It is a national imperative that we do not allow this to 
happen. America and the free world can't afford to let the 
Chinese Communist Party win the race with AI.
    Fortunately, we have an advantage, and that advantage is 
the vast energy resources, the resources that are under the 
feet of my constituents in Pennsylvania. Energy is now the 
limiting factor for building the data centers that AI uses, 
which is why, to win the race for AI, we need to unleash 
American energy.
    We have already begun to see the new project development 
with data center agreements between AWS and Talen Energy at the 
Susquehanna Nuclear Generation Facility, and the reopening of 
Three Mile Island, thanks to the power purchase agreement 
between Constellation Energy and Microsoft.
    Another project in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was the 
announcement to repurpose the retired coal-powered Homer City 
Generating Station. This new facility, powered by 
Pennsylvania's abundant natural gas reserves, will be one of 
the largest power-generating sites in the entire country, 
capable of generating up to a staggering 4.5 gigawatts of 
electricity to power data centers and AI facilities on the 
site, attracting billions of dollars in investment to our 
region.
    These projects show that America's ability to lead the 
world in AI is directly tied to our Nation's energy production. 
We must continue to use our energy advantage in this global 
competition.
    Dr. Schmidt, in earlier public statements you had supported 
moving away from fossil fuel baseload power. Today it seems 
that you have a different view on the energy industry. Can you 
please explain why your views have evolved, and what that 
connects with your views on AI development?
    Dr. Schmidt. Let me also mention that 35 to 40 years ago, 
Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh invented a great deal of the 
world that we are talking about, so thank you to your State and 
to what they were able to do.
    We need all sources of power to accelerate because we don't 
have a choice. If you just assume that you can get there with 
baseload power, with renewables, you can get there--maybe 25, 
30 percent, we can debate it--you can't solve the whole power--
the whole problem as we are laying out without an all-power 
solution. And that is why I am taking the position that I have 
today.
    Mr. Joyce. You mentioned renewables, but renewables do not 
provide that baseload power that is so necessary in the data 
centers. Correct?
    Dr. Schmidt. Not correct. I am sorry, sir. Renewables plus 
batteries are now roughly competitive with the price of new--
natural gas, partly because the natural gas demand has gone so 
much.
    And so, again, from my perspective, the answer is yes to 
all. Let the market sort it out. Let everybody build 
everything. We need it all now.
    Mr. Joyce. And I think, ultimately, we need the nuclear and 
the natural gas to be able to allow those data centers to 
continue to develop and continue to grow.
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes, and let me--sir, may I just emphasize the 
importance of baseload power, which I think is what you are 
getting at?
    We need continuous--if you listen to Micron, these guys are 
superhuman. What they have done in America against the Chinese 
and the other Asian manufacturers is enormous. They need that 
baseload power. That is why your premise is correct.
    Mr. Joyce. Thank you very much. I think we can all agree 
that the baseload power is truly the key to moving forward with 
the development of AI in the United States.
    Mr. Wang, as I mentioned earlier, there are two data center 
projects in Pennsylvania that are colocating with nuclear power 
stations----
    Mr. Guthrie. I am sorry, we are beyond time. Sorry.
    Mr. Joyce. Thank you. I will----
    Mr. Guthrie. Do that for the record--
    Mr. Joyce [continuing]. Issue my questions for followup.
    I thank you again, Chairman Guthrie, for holding this 
important hearing today.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The vice chair of the committee--I 
appreciate--yields back, and the Chair recognizes Ms. Kelly for 
5 minutes for questions.
    Ms. Kelly. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    As my colleagues have noted, this hearing comes at a 
pivotal time. The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk and 
DOGE, are working to rescind key investments made under the 
Inflation Reduction Act, which you have heard, that have 
spurred unprecedented growth in clean energy generation while 
expanding domestic manufacturing opportunities. These 
investments have made a major difference in my district, which 
is urban, suburban, and rural. I go from the City of Chicago 
downstate, where I have 4,500 farms.
    Mr. Turk, given the expected growth in demand and 
significant investments that will be made to our grid's 
infrastructure, can you discuss the difference--the different 
responsibilities between States and Federal governments in 
regulating how these improvements will be paid for?
    Mr. Turk. Yes, absolutely. Luckily, we have got policies in 
place, tax incentives in place, grants in place, loans in place 
to make it more affordable to--for us in our country to build 
the kind of power that we need not just for data centers but 
for the rest of our economy as well. Repealing those tax 
credits--I hope I have been incredibly clear here at this 
hearing--repealing those tax credits, those grants, those loans 
will raise the price, will raise the costs, and will delay how 
quickly we can bring electrons onto our grid.
    So I think it is incredibly important for the Federal 
Government to play a strong role. Luckily, we have got those 
incentives in place, it is just a question of whether we take 
those off the table, take those tools off the table. And I just 
couldn't agree with you more strongly we need those tools on 
the table.
    Ms. Kelly. Well, thank you. I hope everyone is listening.
    Alongside the provisions in the IRA, it is imperative we 
continue working to invest in our Nation's critical supply 
chains. Supporting our capacity to develop and produce a high-
tech revolution is essential for prosperity in this modern 
economy, which is why I was proud to join my colleague, 
Representative Dingell, in leading the Democratic Supply Chains 
Act last Congress. Vital provisions from this package were 
included in the Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act, which 
was passed by this committee yesterday. Efforts like these--not 
unpredictable, unlawful funding cuts and across-the-board 
tariffs on our allies--will help the U.S. lead the way on AI 
while ensuring innovation continues to thrive in communities 
like mine.
    Mr. Turk, during your time as Deputy Secretary, how has the 
rapid growth of AI transformed future planning and 
considerations around grid reliability and resilience?
    Mr. Turk. So AI is an incredibly powerful technology. It 
can help on the grids. The grids are becoming increasingly 
complicated. We have got a complicated patchwork in our 
country. We need to not only have the local grids and the 
regions work, but we need interregional communication, 
interregional flows if we are going to be effective in terms of 
dealing with the challenges that we have got in front of us. So 
AI can be an incredibly powerful tool there.
    We also need an independent FERC to make sure that we have 
got good regulation, predictable regulation, regulation that 
has the certainty that folks can plan for going forward. So we 
need to have that regulatory environment in place too.
    Ms. Kelly. Thank you for your response.
    My district is poised to lead the charge by building an 
innovative quantum computing campus right in Chicago's 
southeast side. I am encouraged by the promise of world-class 
collaborations, exciting new technological advancements, and 
ensuring economic development returns to this community. With 
major projects like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics 
Park and other large-scale data centers coming to the area, we 
must also work to bring new, clean energy generation online to 
help meet the projected load growth in the coming years. We 
could not simultaneously pull back from these critical 
investments while trying to lead on AI and critical 
manufacturing here in the U.S.
    Last question, Mr. Turk: What critical supply chain 
investments need to be made to ensure that we meet projected 
demand while ensuring reliability and affordability?
    Mr. Turk. So, again, we have got a whole panoply of tax 
incentives, grants, and loans. Let me give two specific 
examples.
    We talked about critical minerals earlier in this hearing. 
Because of those tax incentives, because of the grant money 
that we have been given--thank you for giving us that from the 
Congress, from the Department of Energy perspective--we have 
now made a real dent. We are on a pathway to diversifying 
supply chains.
    China holds 80 percent of the processing for critical 
minerals in our world right now. Because of the grants, because 
of the loans, because of the tax incentives, we are on a 
pathway to increase in the U.S. alone--of course, working with 
allies--2,100 percent lithium increase. I could give you a 
statistic for cobalt and other kinds of things.
    So we are on a pathway, but this is not the time to lean 
back----
    Ms. Kelly. Right.
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. To take these tools off the tool 
belt. We need to lean in on that front.
    Ms. Kelly. I am going to have to cut you off, out of 
respect for my time.
    So I yield back, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair will now 
recognize Mr. Weber from Texas for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Weber. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Schmidt, I am going to come to you and then, Mr. Wang, 
you are next.
    When discussing the power needs of the AI industry, it is 
important to look at the recent track record of investment 
decisions in generating facilities. Constellation Energy is 
investing 1.6 billion--with a B--dollars to restart Three Mile 
Island nuclear plant. Amazon Web Services paid $650 million to 
house a data center facility next to a nuclear plant. The Homer 
City Generating Station in Pennsylvania is investing 10 
billion--with a B--dollars to convert a natural gas plant.
    Billions of dollars of investment have gone into AI, and 
barely any is going to wind, solar, or battery storage. So I 
have got kind of a two-pronged question here.
    First of all--we will start this way--can you discuss--oh, 
well, let me--I--let me make this statement. Is it possible 
that those investment companies used AI in their decision on 
how to invest in energy? Let that sink in for just a little 
bit, OK?
    Can you discuss why AI--Mr.--I am coming to you--companies 
are investing billions of dollars into dispatchable and 
reliable generating resources. I know you had the conversation 
with Dr. Dunn, but we are talking about real companies, real 
businesses making real investment decisions based on risk. Your 
thoughts?
    Dr. Schmidt. So all of the data I have seen indicates that 
it is a fair choice now between renewables and batteries, and 
essentially natural gas and so forth. In other words, the 
answer is you want both. How they make those decisions are 
highly local, involving funding, permitting processes, and so 
forth.
    Texas--and what you are doing is phenomenal--if you look 
at--many of the new data centers are being built in Texas 
because of the environment that you all have created, and some 
of the largest ones are being created there.
    Mr. Pallone. Bigger than the country.
    Mr. Weber. I am sorry, I am getting invaded over here.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Weber. By a friendly fire.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Weber. Keep going.
    Dr. Schmidt. So Texas is a really good model of--as you 
know, you have your own electric grid, and it is highly 
unregulated. What I like about the Texas grid is that you see 
real power, real pricing power on a--essentially, a microsecond 
level.
    With respect to how people make these decisions, I hope 
that every company in America uses AI tools to make important, 
strategic decisions. They are natural allies in the business 
decision process.
    Mr. Weber. OK, I am going to actually jump off the 
questioning line I had.
    So AI--so what happens if China, who is so far ahead of us 
because we don't have our permitting process lined up right, we 
are so stupid that it takes so long to permit stuff that China 
doesn't have that problem, what happens if they intercept and 
take over our AI? What happens then?
    Dr. Schmidt. Well, I am not suggesting they will take over 
our AI. Our analysis is that China has very large power 
supplies compared to the United States. They do not have the 
power problem that we see--
    Mr. Weber. So they can't hold our AI hostage?
    Dr. Schmidt. As a technical matter, no. What they can do is 
they can--there are what are called adversarial attacks, where 
they can essentially go in and screw with the model, excuse the 
term, and basically screw it up.
    Mr. Weber. What if they have better AI than we do?
    Dr. Schmidt. That is a competitive issue. And the issue--
one way to think about it is--and I will make an argument--if 
you and I are competitors, you are the good guy, I am the bad 
guy, and I am ahead of you, and I am 6 months ahead of you, you 
say, ``Oh, it is only 6 months.'' But if the slope of 
innovation is near vertical, it is almost impossible for you to 
catch me up.
    Mr. Weber. Right.
    Dr. Schmidt. It is a dynamically unstable----
    Mr. Weber. And that doesn't work when you are talking about 
America's security at risk.
    Dr. Schmidt. It puts----
    Mr. Weber. That analogy doesn't work----
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. Our core national security----
    Mr. Weber. I got you.
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. At risk.
    Mr. Weber. Let me move on.
    Mr. Wang, the Energy Subcommittee held a hearing on the 
role of AI and powering the American energy future October 19, 
2023. AI--during the hearing we discussed how AI can be used to 
improve the performance of the grid used in oil and gas 
production, and also some of the vulnerabilities of AI--like 
kind of you are alluding to, Mr. Schmidt. I have no doubt that 
there have been major advances in AI since that hearing, so I 
have got a couple of questions from you.
    What benefits would there be from integrating AI into our 
Nation's energy sector?
    And would you want that sooner rather than later, and all 
the permitting to be reasonably quick?
    Mr. Wang. I think what you have been alluding to through 
all of your questions is a very important point, which we, I 
think, have been grappling with in the AI industry, which is 
that AI has the ability to transform nearly every industry. 
What--we refer to this in the industry is how do you move 
towards more agentic systems, how do you move towards systems 
where AI are able to make more decisions more quickly, and 
result in an overall dramatically more efficient, more 
effective system? This will tackle every industry over time, 
but particularly in the energy sector it is critical.
    And the last answer is sooner rather than later.
    Mr. Weber. Got you.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Dr. Ruiz for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Ruiz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Consumer protection, data privacy, and artificial 
intelligence impact every American. But for me, I feel a deep 
responsibility to ensure that our Nation gets this right, not 
just as a lawmaker but as a father of two young daughters. I 
see how kids today are shaped by AI-powered platforms and 
digital relationships like never before.
    While tech can inspire creativity, it also poses real 
risks. Studies link heavy social media use, especially for 
young girls, to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Too 
often, AI algorithms promote harmful content over healthy self-
worth content.
    Dr. Schmidt, you have often cited the example of an AI-
enabled teddy bear that learns and evolves with a child, 
highlighting the potential risks of such intimate AI 
relationships. As this scenario becomes increasingly plausible, 
what steps are companies taking to design systems that protect 
rather than exploit young users?
    Dr. Schmidt. So thank you. Every company is very concerned 
about the point you are making, and every company is trying to 
address this question of, let's call it, a rogue AI that comes 
out of themselves partly for moral reasons, but also it is just 
bad for business.
    As to whether the government will ultimately regulate that 
area, it is not clear to me. You do have some things that you 
could do right now. There is a law called COPPA, which has a 
13-year--you have to be 13 to be online. I have strongly 
recommend it to be raised to 16 for that reason. You can also 
look at section 230 and try to reduce some of the most 
egregious harms, and that has been discussed for some time in 
Congress. Those small changes would take the most extreme 
examples of harm and take them out of the market, which is 
probably a good thing.
    Mr. Ruiz. Thank you. You know, too often systems are 
designed to keep kids online longer to collect their data and 
serve them ads for profit. They are not designed to keep them 
safe, respect their privacy, or ensure age-appropriate content. 
That is why we need action, we need enforceable privacy 
safeguards and clear rules on how AI interacts with minors, 
because no algorithm should decide what is best for our kids 
without oversight.
    But we must also be honest about what could stand in the 
way. The sweeping tariffs proposed last week by the Trump 
administration risks slowing innovation, raising costs on the 
very tools needed to build safer online spaces and delaying 
efforts to hold tech companies accountable. They risk putting 
petty politics ahead of public good, and in doing so they leave 
our most vulnerable, our kids, exposed.
    Dr. Schmidt, as efforts to strengthen data privacy and AI 
safeguards move forward, how do you anticipate the 2025 Trump 
administration's tariffs will affect our ability to develop and 
deploy privacy-first technologies designed to better protect 
young users online?
    Dr. Schmidt. I don't know that I can make the combination 
in the question. I will have to think about it.
    I will tell you that tariffs are tax increases. Tax 
increases slow down progress, increase costs, lead to 
inflation, are generally bad.
    Mr. Ruiz. Deputy Secretary Turk, the Department of Energy, 
particularly through its national labs, has been deeply engaged 
in advancing AI safety and red teaming efforts. Can you speak 
to the importance of DOE's role in this space, and what the 
implications might be if that role were diminished or 
reassigned by the administration?
    Mr. Turk. Absolutely. We have got world-class experts at 
our national labs, nuclear experts, bioweapons experts. We need 
to make sure that that expertise is tapped into, those 
individuals are utilized for this red teaming, right?
    So before a model comes out, have those folks with their 
expertise working with the companies to make sure that those 
models--not purposefully, I don't think any company, certainly 
here, would purposefully put out a model that allows a 
terrorist to build a nuclear weapon, but they don't have the 
nuclear expertise to ensure that that is the case. That is why 
having these experts, these Government experts, these 
independent experts, are so important as part of that red 
teaming.
    Getting rid of those folks is absolutely a national 
security concern, would have serious national security 
implications not just for AI, but for everything that we need 
those experts for.
    Mr. Ruiz. Thank you. You know, we have the opportunity and 
the responsibility to get this right. We cannot afford to wait 
until we see another crisis in youth mental health, another 
generation struggling with digital addiction, or another data 
breach exposing millions of children's personal information. So 
I urge my colleagues, let's put families first.
    Thank you, and I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. Dr. Ruiz yields back. Mr. Allen is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Allen. Thank you, Chair Guthrie, for hosting this full 
committee hearing examining AI and impacts--how it impacts 
development----
    Mr. Ruiz. They gave it----
    Mr. Allen [continuing]. With an all-out energy approach and 
the technology. And certainly, we have got to be competitive 
globally.
    In fact, you know, we wouldn't be hiring this--we wouldn't 
be having this hearing if President Trump were not in office, 
because he has said that his--part of his agenda is an all-out 
energy program. We need to dominate energy in the world. And of 
course, AI, we understand that race. And so--and everything 
that we are doing, our conference is doing, is to provide every 
opportunity for us to be the energy-dominant country that we 
were just 6 years ago. And so that is what is so critical, and 
that is why we are having this hearing today to find out, OK, 
what do we need to do to make that happen?
    I would like to thank you for being here, our witnesses.
    You know, with the emergence of AI, the U.S. has to be a 
global leader. To be a leader in AI, it is critical that our 
energy sector is equipped to meet the demands of--that AI 
poses.
    Dr. Schmidt, in about 2030, data centers can consume 
upwards of 9 percent of total U.S. electricity at the same time 
as we are seeing historic projections of electricity demand 
because of AI developments, and the Nation's bulk power system 
is already under incredible strains. In fact, the North 
American Electrical--Electric Reliable Corporation, or NERC, 
found in their last long-term reliability assessment that half 
the Nation is at risk of resource adequacy. We know in some 
States we are having brownouts. That is, half the Nation is at 
risk to blackouts during times of extreme weather.
    In my opinion, our Nation will need significantly more 
power to meet these demands, and fast. How can we balance the 
needs of everyday Americans to keep the lights on while 
simultaneously powering developments in AI models?
    Dr. Schmidt. The answer, of course, starts with our overall 
premise, which is more of everything. It also includes a more 
intelligent grid that is more flexible when bad things happen. 
That is now possible with AI and with grid modernization. You 
need both.
    Mr. Allen. Mr. Bhatia, last month we heard directly from 
the grid operators talking about grid who are charged with 
overseeing the reliability of our electric grid. And they 
highlighted one of the biggest issues facing the bulk power 
system is the premature retirement of baseload power plants, 
which has been mentioned quite often in this hearing.
    We also heard that places like New England, who do not have 
sufficient natural gas capability and longstanding opposition 
to nuclear energy, are not seeing the same uptick in new 
investments or data centers and manufacturing facilities.
    My home State of Georgia, which has been the best State to 
do business in 12 years in a row, has been a leader in 
investment in job-creating industries, largely because of our 
probusiness environment and diverse slate of baseload-
generating resources. In fact, now we have just added to Plant 
Vogtle two more units, and it is the largest clean energy 
facility in the United States built in the last 30 years.
    Given your company's energy-intensive nature, how important 
is access to reliable, affordable electricity when deciding 
where to invest in U.S. manufacturing facilities?
    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you, Congressman, and I would like to 
just start by giving a call out to our research and development 
center that we have in your home State. And we have certainly 
found that, over time, that that has been a wonderful place for 
us to attract talent and grow our engineering capabilities 
there.
    Mr. Allen. Yes.
    Mr. Bhatia. In terms of your question on baseload, 
absolutely. I think many of the questions today have been 
focused on that.
    And for, you know, semiconductor operations, we have very, 
very consistent loads. We have, of course, high loads. And the 
reliability of the power is incredibly important, as I have 
mentioned earlier. So nuclear power, hydroelectric power, these 
are excellent fits for us. But we also agree with the other 
panelists an all-of-the-above approach is what is required.
    Mr. Allen. Good. I have a few--Mr. Bhatia, I have a few 
yes-or-no questions I am going to ask you.
    Do you agree that permitting reform is needed to meet, as 
you discuss in your testimony, our rising energy demand?
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Allen. Do you agree that it includes air permitting?
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Allen. The National Ambient Air Quality standards 
implemented by the Biden-Harris administration's EPA, for 
example, have proven to be a significant burden on the U.S. 
manufacturing base. These stringent regulations have made it 
difficult to permit and develop many of the facilities needed 
to support our next generation of industrial base. Whether it 
be PM 2.5 or ozone, EPA needs to be more flexible. No question 
about it.
    Mr. Guthrie. Your time is----
    Mr. Allen. My time has expired. I have an additional 
question for you. If you would answer that for the record, I 
would appreciate it.
    And I yield back.
    Mr. Bhatia. I would be----
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentleman yields back. The 
Chair recognizes Ms. Clarke for 5 minutes for questions.
    Ms. Clarke. Thank you very much, Chairman Guthrie, Ranking 
Member Pallone. And to our panelists for today's hearing, thank 
you to our witnesses for being here to testify.
    And let me just say that it is a pleasure to see Micron 
presented--represented on this panel, as Micron is making 
historic investments in New York that will transform our State 
and the semiconductor industry more broadly.
    Members of this committee are well aware that generative 
artificial intelligence has proven to be one of the most 
impressive technological advancements of this generation. But 
with a tool so expansive, it is up to us to ensure that AI 
systems are developed and deployed responsibly and with 
consumers in mind.
    Last Congress I had the honor of being appointed to the 
Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, which was 
established to ensure that the United States continues to lead 
in AI innovation, as well as examine appropriate guardrails to 
protect against emerging threats like those outlined in the 
2023 GAO Report on the Rapid Use and Growth of AI. I have been 
sounding the alarm on issues related to AI and algorithms for 
years, namely the potential for algorithmic bias.
    AI has only gotten smarter. And with its rapid development, 
consumers are faced with the increasingly acute potential for 
harm caused by algorithmic discrimination. For example, facial 
recognition technology, a tool used by both retail stores and 
law enforcement, has repeatedly shown an inability to 
accurately identify people of color, which has led to multiple 
instances of false identification and unwarranted harassment. 
And when it comes to home ownership, Black applicants are 
denied mortgages at higher rates, a decision that is 
increasingly made based on algorithms. In healthcare, 
algorithmic bias can lead to misdiagnosis, as the people of 
color are historically underrepresented in existing data sets, 
and algorithms are improperly tested for accuracy.
    My top priority with respect to the growing use of AI is 
simple. We need to make it abundantly clear to developers and 
deployers of algorithmic systems that Americans do not forfeit 
their civil liberties when they go online. That is why I have 
prioritized algorithmic accountability and have fought to 
codify and make explicitly clear that civil rights protections 
still apply in the digital realm, especially when AI is used in 
critical decision making.
    Lines of code remain exempt from our antidiscrimination 
laws and too often go unchecked. Every algorithm has an author. 
Every bias has an origin. Through proper regulation we must 
ensure safety, inclusion, and equity are top of mind in the 
deployment of automated, critical decision-making systems that 
affect Americans' lives.
    And while I am pleased with the final report of the 
bipartisan Task Force on AI and find that it serves as a 
productive framework to set guardrails on AI that includes 
civil rights and liberties, the conversation does not end 
there. It is up to this committee, my Republican colleagues, 
who seemingly have an aversion to the words ``civil rights,'' 
to properly protect all Americans when they either electively 
or unknowingly use AI to make critical life decisions.
    I have one question, Mr. Turk: Do you agree that it is 
important to ensure that AI systems are rigorously tested for 
bias before they are deployed and on a regular basis 
thereafter?
    Mr. Turk. Well, let me first thank you for your leadership 
on the bipartisan task force and more generally, and I 
completely agree we need to have those kinds of protections in 
place. This is a powerful technology, an incredibly powerful 
technology, and we need to get this right.
    Ms. Clarke. Yes, I am just concerned that, you know, some 
biases get baked into our systems and that inaccuracy can be 
detrimental not only to communities but to our ability as a 
nation to be as strong as possible, particularly when guarding 
against adversaries that seek to do us harm.
    So thank you for your work, gentlemen. I appreciate all 
that you are doing.
    Young man, Mr. Wang, you are making it happen.
    [Laughter.]
    Ms. Clarke. We are proud of you. Much continued success.
    And I yield back the balance of my time.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentlelady yields back, and the 
Chair recognizes Mr. Balderson for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Balderson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for 
holding this hearing today, and I would like to thank all the 
witnesses for being here also today.
    Let me start with you, Dr. Schmidt.
    I represent Ohio's 12th Congressional District, which 
covers central and southeastern Ohio. Licking County, which I 
am proud to represent, has one of the largest clusters of data 
centers in the country. Google, Amazon Web Services, Meta, QTS, 
Vantage, and more all have data centers in central Ohio and my 
district. In total, power demand from data centers will reach 
5,000 megawatts in central Ohio by 2030, based on signed power 
agreements. Just last month, Williams announced a $1.6 billion 
investment to build new--two new natural gas-fired plants in 
Licking County with a combined capacity of 400 megawatts. This 
reliable baseload power generation is critical to meet growing 
demand in central Ohio.
    Dr. Schmidt, in order to alleviate strain on the electric 
grid, I am curious what role or involvement you think these 
tech companies should have in helping to bring in new 
generation to secure the massive amounts of power needed for 
their facilities.
    And how should these companies partner with grid operators 
or power providers to ensure we can properly account for 
tracking--growing tracking demand?
    Dr. Schmidt. So when I was at Google, we made a bet on Ohio 
and we built the largest data center at the time in the world, 
which was massive. And I used to go visit it. And so, oh my 
God, the data centers you are describing are 10 times larger 
than anything I ever built way back when I was doing this only 
7 years ago. So it gives you a sense of the scale of the 
investment in what you are doing.
    The best thing to do is to have a strategy within your 
State where everybody agrees to solve the energy power problem. 
We found in--working in Ohio that we were able to get access to 
the high-voltage lines that we could not get access elsewhere. 
We built our own substations, which are also massive. That is 
what it takes. That is what every one of you is going to have 
to do to have your States be a center for AI--the AI 
revolution.
    Mr. Balderson. Thank you.
    Mr. Bhatia, I will switch to you. I would also like to hear 
your thoughts on this. What is Micron doing to be proactive in 
securing the power needed for these chip fabs?
    Mr. Bhatia. So as part of our selection of the locations 
where we will be expanding, the power availability and the 
agreements that we could reach with local power companies was a 
key part of that criteria. As I mentioned before, nuclear 
power, hydroelectric power, both very good fits for us, and 
those are in strong availability in the areas where we 
selected, and we continue to work with the providers in those 
areas to be able to ensure that we can have more investments to 
be able to have long-term access to that affordable and 
reliable power.
    Mr. Balderson. Thank you. I will continue with you, sir. 
You note that one of America's strongest competitive advantages 
compared to markets in Asia is our reliable and affordable 
energy supply. I strongly agree with you, with this assessment 
that we must maintain this key competitive advantage by 
building out generating capacity to meet the expected short-
term surge in energy demand after years of flat growth.
    However, right now we are seeing massive backlogs of 
generation project and grid operators, interconnection queues. 
Depending upon the region, power projects are sitting and 
waiting in interconnection queues for 5 years before they can 
even get studied and then ultimately built and connected to the 
grid. The build-out of AI and data centers isn't happening in 5 
years. It isn't happening now, and these facilities need power. 
Do you have concerns that the current process can take years 
and years just for new power generation projects to get through 
the queue?
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Balderson. Thank you. Do you think Congress can play a 
role in ensuring new generation is getting online and connected 
faster, given the historic increase in power demand?
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Balderson. Thank you very much.
    Dr. Schmidt, would you like to add anything to that?
    Dr. Schmidt. The interconnection queues are a very good 
example of something which is something that you all need to 
work on: basically, getting the system to be more flexible when 
the industry shows the demand.
    I mean, the delays are crazy, right? People--they have the 
money, they have the ability to get the power built, and they 
can't interconnect it. That is a good example of grid 
modernization. It applies to everybody.
    Mr. Balderson. So I encourage you--we have introduced some 
legislation called the GRID Act, and it is all about the 
interconnection queue.
    So with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.
    Mr. Joyce [presiding]. The gentleman yields. The Chair 
recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Peters, for his 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do think it is great 
that the whole committee is hearing this.
    And I thought particularly, Dr. Schmidt, I want to 
compliment you on setting the table on this because we are 
caught up in a lot of little things, and you really gave us a 
very big perspective on how important and daunting this is.
    I had a bunch of questions from before. I am only going to 
ask one, which is about the Energy Permitting Reform Act, or 
EPRA, which was the Senate permitting deal at the end.
    Mr. Turk, can you talk a little bit about the importance of 
transmission and the importance of interregional planning and 
interregional transmission as a way to help deal with our 
energy needs?
    Mr. Turk. Well, put simply, we just need to make 
improvements. We need to get the most out of our existing 
transmission: grid-enhancing technologies, reconductoring, 
bringing AI and other tools to make sure that we are smart 
about these assets and they are flexible and they are smart.
    And then secondly, we do need new transmission, and it does 
take too long in our country to build transmission. We 
underwent a whole series of reforms in the Biden administration 
to try to improve that, and I think we made some significant 
progress, but we need to do more. And certainly, Congress has 
an incredibly important role here.
    Mr. Peters. Well, I am an advocate on this committee and 
the Energy Subcommittee for permit reform. We did a lot of work 
to get EPRA to the point it was. I think we should start with 
that and adopt it.
    I will say that this concept of all-of-the-above energy, I 
understand--I think sometimes it is all of the above as long as 
it is natural gas. The thing I would say is we--I was recently 
at a meeting with the energy company and some of my Republican 
colleagues, where they said now it takes 5 years to get a 
national--natural gas plant online, largely because of the 
supply chain constraints and getting turbines. But you can get 
solar within a year. And the company was begging us not to 
repeal the incentives for solar power and probably wind that 
are in the IRA. And I hope, when we talk about all of the 
above, we are really committed to all of the above and that we 
don't do something to shoot ourselves in the foot.
    With respect to natural gas, I am more than willing to work 
on natural gas. I have been saying like a broken record what I 
want out of that, from an environmental perspective, is some 
agreement on the regulation of fugitive emissions, methane 
emissions. It is an easy thing to do. It is something the 
industry is open to. If we did that here, it would solve a lot 
of--it would answer a lot of the questions we have about the 
use of methane or use of natural gas as a bridge fuel. I think 
that is an easy thing to follow.
    I would reiterate what some other people see, the need to 
invest in basic science is really critical here. China is more 
than keeping pace with us. They are outinvesting us by quite a 
bit. In my district a lot of that is in biotechnology, but a 
lot of it is in fusion. And I think that is something that we 
have to continue to invest in. It is--it would really solve a 
lot of problems, but it takes investment. And I think 
investment in energy in our universities, the best university 
system in the world, the best set of universities in the world, 
is really critical to this--for this country.
    I agree that our data is ridiculously unmanaged and 
uncoordinated. We saw this in COVID. I tried to deal with it in 
COVID. You can't draw conclusions from a data set that is so 
disparate and unorganized. I think that your comments were 
really wise about that, sir, and I think that Congress has a 
role in making sure that we get on top of that.
    I would--do not want to overlook the role of imports in 
this. I mean, we do not make solar panels here. We import a lot 
of things. We are making it more expensive. It is craziness. It 
is a craziness. And I think, for the Republicans who used to be 
such staunch supporters of free trade, and Democrats like me 
who supported both the Trans-Pacific partnership and the USMCA 
negotiated by Donald Trump, we can't forget the benefits of 
that international trading system and that the cost of inputs 
that we need to solve this problem are really being heightened 
by this trade war and this self-harm.
    I do want to say, too, that I think we should think hard 
about whether some of the calculations can be decentralized. We 
have taken for granted, we have taken as a given that there is 
a certain amount of energy we need. I have no doubt that it is 
a lot. I had actually heard 5 gigawatts for a data center, now 
I hear 10. That is a massive challenge. We ought to think about 
whether, as a--systemically, some of those calculations could 
be done on these handheld devices. It would take some of the 
power requirements away from those big facilities.
    And finally, I would--the other thing I would observe as a 
Californian is we can't let ourselves get into the situation we 
are in with privacy, where we have 38 different standards 
across the country. This committee has got to come to grips 
with the notion we have to do preemption. There is a Federal 
supremacy clause for that reason. This has got to be a national 
policy. We have got to set national standards. We have got to 
do it on privacy, we have got to do it on AI, and we can't be 
scared of using our power here.
    Thank you very much. We have a lot of work to do. Again, 
thanks so much for the witnesses. And I yield back.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman yields. The Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from Texas, Mr. Pfluger, for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Pfluger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Dr. Schmidt, Mr. Bhatia, what role will LNG play in 
providing the power that is necessary for AI and data centers?
    Dr. Schmidt. I am sorry, LNG?
    Mr. Pfluger. Natural gas.
    Dr. Schmidt. So natural gas? It sure looks like natural gas 
is needed in most renewables scenarios because of, essentially, 
a peaker plant. It also looks like we just need more natural 
gas, more natural gas generation kind of everywhere.
    Mr. Pfluger. Mr. Bhatia, you mentioned that in your 
testimony----
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Pfluger [continuing]. Earlier today about concerns with 
intermittent power. So when we are looking at sourcing, what do 
you need, intermittent? Or do you need a reliable baseload?
    Mr. Bhatia. Well, so we have--obviously, we need reliable 
baseload power. Natural gas has the ability to be able to be a 
really good smoothing capability for the--and buffer, 
basically--for the ups and downs of the overall grid. And that 
is why I would agree with Dr. Schmidt that it is an important 
area, and it is an element--it is an area that the United 
States has, you know, a tremendous amount of capability in.
    Mr. Pfluger. The power providers were here. ERCOT testified 
last week, and they said that Texas alone is at a peak demand 
of about 80 to 85 gigs right now, and that is going to increase 
in the next 4 to 5 years to 150. So Mr. Turk, are you familiar 
with the study that DOE did last year--it actually started in 
2023--on LNG?
    Mr. Turk. I am.
    Mr. Pfluger. What was your role in the----
    Mr. Turk. So I was the----
    Mr. Pfluger [continuing]. Department of Energy?
    Mr. Turk. I was at that time the Deputy Secretary, the 
number 2 official.
    Mr. Pfluger. OK, did you----
    Mr. Turk. And I was very involved.
    Mr. Pfluger. You were involved with that report?
    Mr. Turk. I was.
    Mr. Pfluger. What was the title of that report?
    Mr. Turk. I don't remember what the title of the report 
was.
    What we did is we asked a number of our national labs to 
give----
    Mr. Pfluger. Let me----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. Us an independent assessment.
    Mr. Pfluger. OK. When was that report released?
    Mr. Turk. We pushed our national labs to do it as quickly 
as possible, and----
    Mr. Pfluger. When did the Department of Energy release the 
report?
    Mr. Turk. I think we ended up releasing it late last year 
or early this year.
    Mr. Pfluger. OK. So you actually did release it?
    Mr. Turk. We did release it.
    Mr. Pfluger. Were there sections that were redacted?
    Mr. Turk. Not to my knowledge.
    Mr. Pfluger. That is----
    Mr. Turk. We believe very strongly----
    Mr. Pfluger. That is what was reported.
    Mr. Turk. We wanted an independent analysis to look at the 
cost implications, the environmental implications, and we did 
not suppress any information whatsoever.
    Mr. Pfluger. Were you aware of the 2023 study's findings 
prior to the January 26 decision to indefinitely ban new export 
authorizations under section 3 of the Natural Gas Act?
    Mr. Turk. So we didn't ban any--we did the study in order 
to take a step back because we have authorized so much. Up to 
half of our natural gas production right now is authorized to 
actually go abroad and to be sold, including to China.
    Mr. Pfluger. Why was----
    Mr. Turk. So what we did was take a pause----
    Mr. Pfluger. I will reclaim my----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. Did the study, and then----
    Mr. Pfluger. I will reclaim my--Mr. Turk, thank you. Thank 
you. Pause, ban, we can debate this all day long, but why was 
the study not released immediately after it was done?
    Mr. Turk. So it was.
    Mr. Pfluger. So----
    Mr. Turk. We released the study--
    Mr. Pfluger. So do you----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. Once the experts finished the study.
    Mr. Pfluger. Do you disagree that the study was more 
favorable to LNG than the Biden administration would have 
liked, and that is why there was a pause put on LNG exports?
    Mr. Turk. The study--the pause was so that we could do the 
study before making decisions.
    Mr. Pfluger. So--
    Mr. Turk. And to actually have our independent experts, and 
the independent experts in our national labs were the one who 
did the study.
    Mr. Pfluger. OK. So the study actually came out, was 
released by Secretary Wright, and----
    Mr. Turk. We released the study.
    Mr. Pfluger [continuing]. There was----
    Mr. Turk. The Biden administration released the study.
    Mr. Pfluger. In December of 2026--or December of 2024, 
excuse me. And it came out as a--pretty favorable with regards 
to emissions, but it was delayed by the Biden administration 
for months----
    Mr. Turk. It wasn't.
    Mr. Pfluger [continuing]. On being released. Well, that 
is----
    Mr. Turk. It wasn't. I was there. It wasn't delayed.
    Mr. Pfluger. It----
    Mr. Turk. That is how long it took because we wanted a 
thorough, independent analysis by several of our national labs.
    Mr. Pfluger. So do you agree that the emissions of natural 
gas were better and more consistent and actually more favorable 
than what you claimed and what Secretary Granholm claimed in 
the attempt to ban natural gas exports?
    Mr. Turk. So LNG exports have a very, very significant--a 
very significant greenhouse gas footprint. So just one project, 
we are talking 4 BCF per day. That project itself has more 
emissions throughout the life cycle--methane emissions, but 
CO2 combustion--when that gas is burned than 141----
    Mr. Pfluger. You haven't----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. Countries in our world.
    Mr. Pfluger. You haven't answered my question, so----
    Mr. Turk. That is one facility, 141 countries in our world.
    Mr. Pfluger. So----
    Mr. Turk. That is a pretty significant footprint.
    Mr. Pfluger. So you stand by your decision to ban LNG 
exports.
    Mr. Turk. Again, we did a pause so we could do the study.
    Mr. Pfluger. And you stand by that.
    Mr. Turk. And so that any Secretary of State could have 
good, independent analysis----
    Mr. Pfluger. Your decision to do that is going to impact 
these guys right here. It is going to impact our ability to 
provide power for the AI data center--
    Mr. Turk. So again, that is LNG that is being exported.
    Mr. Pfluger. OK.
    Mr. Turk. This had nothing to do with domestic use of gas 
here.
    Mr. Pfluger. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Turk. In fact----
    Mr. Pfluger. Thank you.
    Mr. Turk. In fact----
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. The more we export, the more price 
pressure for our----
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman yields.
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. Domestic.
    Mr. Joyce. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Soto from Florida 
for his 5 minutes.
    Mr. Soto. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    You know, listening to this hearing, I feel like we are in 
a time warp back to 2024. Biden was president, we had the 
strongest economy in the world, and we were free to debate the 
finer points of AI regulation, the IRA, and data centers. But 
it is April 9, 80 days into the Trump administration, and 
Trump's tariffs, chaos, and deportations have sent our economy 
into a freefall while our friends across the aisle just bury 
their heads in the sand and pretend this isn't happening. Or 
will you join us to help fix it?
    Speaker Johnson just today blocked any consideration of 
tariffs until September 30. He put a straitjacket on the U.S. 
House of Representatives to even try to address this issue. 
Meanwhile, AI data centers could see an estimated 30 percent 
increase in expenses to build, according to Fortune magazine 
this week. Air conditioning, liquid cooling systems, 
transformers, circuit breakers, cabling, routers, switches, 
construction materials, battery systems will all go up because 
of Trump's tariffs.
    So is the biggest threat to AI overregulation, or is it the 
tariffs? Duh.
    Mr. Turk, what do you think is the biggest threat right now 
to AI development, is it the overregulation, allegedly, or is 
it tariffs?
    Mr. Turk. I think tariffs increase costs, and they increase 
uncertainty, and that is damaging for AI being built in our 
country, but it is damaging across our economy.
    Mr. Soto. And then we--I am worried about demand and access 
to capital. I heard it in both Newsweek and in Fortune magazine 
this week: access to capital is in real jeopardy because major 
tech companies, the biggest investors in AI, see a potential 
recession on the way and their core businesses are threatened. 
Ad spending drops, the capital drops during a recession.
    Dr. Schmidt, we saw that the Google shares were at $200 a 
share when Trump took office, and now they are at $146, a 27 
percent drop in 3 months. No one celebrates that, that is 
awful. That would have a negative effect on future AI 
investments for Google right now. Isn't that true?
    Dr. Schmidt. Don't remind me of the stock price.
    Mr. Soto. Yes, I didn't mean that--I am not here to attack 
anybody, I was--but that--but how does that affect Google's 
investment in future AI?
    Dr. Schmidt. I can't speak for Google, but I can say in 
general the genius of the American financial system, aside from 
the fact that we are a reserve currency, is that crazy 
entrepreneurs can raise billions of dollars on a whim, on a 
risk. That is why we are leading. If that system breaks, the 
system that is the unification of the government, the private 
sector, and academics, and that money is not available, we are 
toast.
    Mr. Soto. Yes, we are the world's currency right now. But, 
you know, that is in jeopardy as we speak.
    Mr. Bhatia, we saw Micron take a thump too, from 109 per 
share when Trump took office to 65 today, a 41 percent drop. 
Again, no one likes this or celebrates this, but how does that 
affect your access to capital and the ability for you to 
continue to develop AI chips--AI microchips and technology?
    Mr. Bhatia. So, you know, we have--we take a long-term 
view, and the demand for growing, for memory--the demand for 
data, and therefore the demand for memory--continues to grow. 
It is a secular trend. And so we intend our investments to be 
for the long term, but we have to bring them online--in line 
with the demand trends that we see. And so we continue to 
expand in that way.
    But that shows the importance of--and these kind of 
volatile events will happen from time to time in our industry, 
and that shows the importance of us having a durable, 
predictable investment tax credit to be able to support our 
continued expansion here in the United States, where we are 
committed to building.
    Mr. Soto. We all want to make sure these stocks go back up 
and people's retirements are protected, and that is why this 
Congress needs to work together. We did work together on the 
bipartisan ADVANCE Act, which boosted nuclear, signed by 
President Biden, a bipartisan product from this committee.
    Mr. Turk, how does the speeding up of deployment and 
licensing of new reactors and fuels help, through nuclear, the 
future of AI?
    Mr. Turk. So I think it is a big deal, and thank you for 
the leadership on the ADVANCE Act. We need to not only get the 
most out of the resources that we have got, including those 
resources that can be brought on quickly to our grid--right now 
that is solar and storage and wind, those are the resources 
that allow us to bring electrons on quickly to power these AI 
data centers--but we absolutely have to work on clean baseload 
power. Nuclear is an incredibly important part of that 
equation. Enhanced geothermal is another incredibly important 
part. And so we need to have the research, we need to have the 
investment, and we need to have those tools as quickly as we 
can.
    Mr. Soto. Thanks.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Fulcher, for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Fulcher. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Bhatia, in a different era back years ago, I was 
privileged to work for Micron Technology. Technically, I began 
with the startup phase. It was still in startup phase. I spent 
15 years there. I cannot tell you how proud I am of that and 
the education that I received personally, and the experience, 
life experience, that was truly unique. And I could not have 
higher regard for your company. And so please know that.
    At that time, as I say, things were different. But we sold 
ourselves, we positioned ourselves with customers and potential 
customers that most of our costs were fixed. And whether we 
produced one die or a million die, the costs were largely the 
same, and that gave us the ability to sell ourselves as an 
American supplier.
    Now, today you discussed how energy is one of the factors 
that has changed that business model. In those days it was all 
about die size, and could we stack the capacitors and make it 
efficient, and that was the secret sauce. And if we got that, 
we won.
    What has changed in today's business model, other than the 
energy that you correctly spoke about to change that strategy 
and business model in the framework that you are operating in 
today?
    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you. Thank you, Congressman, and thank 
you for your time in the early days of Micron and helping put 
the company on the track to where it is today.
    I think the biggest thing that has changed is the cost 
competitiveness of building and operating fabs in the United 
States over this last 25 to 30 years has become a widening gap 
between doing that in the United States versus Asian countries 
where we operate.
    Mr. Fulcher. Construction cost, just to be clear----
    Mr. Bhatia. Construction cost is one of the biggest gaps. 
It is probably the biggest gap between the Asian countries and 
where our competitors are versus the United States.
    In fact, the energy is an area that has been a bright spot 
for the United States, and it is an area that, you know, the 
focus of this hearing is to make sure that it continues to be 
an area of advantage for semiconductor industry, for Micron, 
but also for many other industries so that we are able to be 
able to make sure that all of these projects can come to 
fruition. And----
    Mr. Fulcher. Workforce?
    Mr. Bhatia. And the investments we are making in workforce, 
you know, we certainly believe that, in partnership with the 
many different universities that we are working with across the 
country, that we are going to be able to redevelop a pipeline 
of skills and capabilities that have been lost over the years 
as manufacturing left the country.
    We are also working with various different military exit 
organizations to be able to train veterans to come and work, 
because we think there is a really good overlap between the 
skills that they have from the military and the skills that 
they have to be able to operate and maintain fabs.
    And I think, you know, as I have mentioned before, 
expanding and extending the currently expiring investment tax 
credit for semiconductor projects is really, really very 
critical.
    Mr. Fulcher. Got it, and I am going to come back to you if 
I have time.
    Mr. Wang, I want to ask you a question. In your testimony 
you said there's three things Congress should do in order to 
move forward regarding AI. The second point you made was one 
Federal AI standard. We have had discussions about that on the 
committee. Dig that a little deeper. Peel that onion back.
    Specifically, what should those standards be, to the best 
of your advice?
    Mr. Wang. Yes. So first of all, just speaking as an AI 
company and being able to operate and innovate effectively, we 
need one Federal standard. We cannot afford a patchwork of 50 
different State standards----
    Mr. Fulcher. I understand.
    Mr. Wang [continuing]. That we have to execute against.
    Then peeling the onion back, we believe that we need to 
create a regulatory framework that enables innovation while 
still adding some level of guardrails. So our view is we need a 
use case, sector-specific regulatory framework, where in 
certain industries like medicine or financial services or 
insurance or others, where there should be heightened levels of 
scrutiny or heightened levels of controls for what AI systems 
can and should do, we should put those in place. But in other 
industries where we want the core technology to advance more 
rapidly and more effectively, we need to allow that to happen.
    Mr. Fulcher. OK. And I am about out of time, and I am going 
to submit some questions for the record, Mr. Chairman.
    But Mr. Wang, I do think you are a wealth of knowledge, and 
I would just say to you and the rest of the committee, as we go 
about--forward in setting or trying to set some Federal 
standards, please be careful what you ask for, because you just 
might get it. And we can be a friend, or we can be a very ugly 
big brother. And I say that because it is very difficult to 
identify the proper role of the Federal Government with these 
things.
    So thank you to all those who testified.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman yields. The Chair recognizes the 
gentlelady from Michigan, Mrs. Dingell, for her 5 minutes.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to Chair 
Guthrie and Ranking Member Pallone for convening this hearing.
    AI, as has been discussed today, is transforming every 
sector, from healthcare and transportation to manufacturing. 
But with rapid advancements come serious challenges such as 
data privacy risks, algorithmic bias, and the growing threat of 
foreign adversaries exploiting our vulnerabilities. And we 
cannot afford to let America's data and personal information be 
weaponized by China or other adversaries, or allow AI to spread 
unchecked through deep fakes, robocalls, and deceptive ads. 
That is why I was proud to help lead the TAKE IT DOWN Act, 
which passed out of the committee yesterday, to hold bad actors 
accountable for sharing nonconsensual deepfake content online 
and to protect survivors.
    AI, when paired with 5G and emerging technologies, is 
already transforming lives, streamlining public services, 
modernizing transportation, and improving healthcare outcomes. 
But to lead, we have to invest. That is what we were doing 
during the Biden administration. And quite frankly, I am very 
worried that we are now witnessing efforts to undo that 
progress.
    Programs that were signed into law through the Bipartisan 
Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation 
Reduction Act, all of which provided funding that is crucial 
for the AI ecosystem, are being dismantled. And these 
investments aren't just about clean energy. That is what people 
don't understand. They are about global competitiveness, job 
creation, and securing the future of the American industry. The 
IRA has been critical to accelerating domestic manufacturing, 
especially in the auto sector--I admit that is one I care about 
deeply--which remains the backbone of the American economy.
    My Republican colleagues say we must outcompete China in 
AI. They are right. We must. I agree. But you don't win it by 
slashing your own tires. You can't lead by cutting funding, 
firing experts, and abandoning the public-private partnerships 
that fuel innovation.
    Secretary Turk, does cutting funding from agencies like the 
Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, holding 
up CHIPS investments, threatening that they may not happen, 
firing technical experts at NIST keep the U.S. competitive in 
the global AI race, especially as China ramps up its 
investments?
    And what happens if we walk away from CHIPS and the IRA 
incentives?
    Mr. Turk. I think this is exactly the wrong time to walk 
away for those--from those incentives.
    Mrs. Dingell. OK, short.
    [Laughter.]
    Mrs. Dingell. Mr. Bhatia, what are the --I like it. It is 
wrong.
    What are the consequences of repealing the tax credits and 
public investments that are driving domestic industry growth 
and clean energy and advanced manufacturing?
    Mr. Bhatia. Well, Congresswoman, first I would like to just 
comment that I am proud to have been born and raised in 
Michigan. My first job in manufacturing was more than 30 years 
ago in the body shop, and that created my love of 
manufacturing.
    And, you know, a thriving automotive industry, as you said 
in your comments, is, I think, critical for the country's, you 
know, economic health, as well as for national security.
    I absolutely agree that we need to have continued support 
for investment tax credits for areas that are critical to AI, 
including, of course, semiconductor manufacturing. The tax 
credit that was passed is expiring, and this will create a 
challenge for continued investment, especially long-term 
investment, because this is not just a 5-year race. This is a 
15-, 20-year race that we are getting into, and we want to make 
sure we have leadership in technology and capacity together to 
be able to lead in creating the--in enabling the AI revolution.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you.
    Dr. Schmidt, do companies operating in the U.S. currently 
have meaningful incentives to protect consumer data and 
privacy?
    Are the current patchwork of State laws and voluntary 
standards sufficient, or would a comprehensive Federal privacy 
law with strong data minimization provide greater clarity and 
consistency for both consumers and the industry?
    Dr. Schmidt. I think there is a general view in the 
industry that a single privacy law would be a good outcome. I 
think it will be very hard to achieve. My own opinion is, given 
that it is hard to achieve, you are better off working on the 
most extreme cases, such as I fully support the bill you did 
yesterday. That is a good example of an extreme case. Maybe 
there's some other extreme cases that we could also handle 
through your good work.
    Mrs. Dingell. Well, more questions, and I want to dig into 
that too, Mr. Chairman, because I am out--I am going to have 
questions for the record, as some of my other colleagues do.
    But this is a very important issue, all of them are. Thank 
you, Mr. Chair, and I yield back.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentlelady yields. The Chair recognizes the 
gentlewoman from Tennessee, Dr. Harshbarger, for her 5 minutes.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the 
witnesses for being here today.
    I will start with you, Dr. Schmidt. When tech companies are 
building the future of AI in the United States, we know these 
data centers use massive sums of energy. And for the most part, 
they are going to be running at maximum capacity 24/7. And this 
technology requires more baseload power--production, rather 
than renewables like wind and energy, where that production 
fluctuates.
    And my question is, How would it strengthen America's bid 
to lead the AI economy if we adopted a more friendly 
environment for natural gas and build out additional pipeline 
infrastructure?
    Dr. Schmidt. I agree with the need for more natural gas in 
the United States, more pipelines. I would also point out that 
you can achieve the same baseload goal with a combination of 
batteries and renewable. I think that the industry and the 
energy suppliers should make those on an economic basis, and I 
think the collective panel here is telling all of you----
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. All of more is better.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Yes, all of the above.
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Mr. Bhatia, your testimony goes into 
great detail about the difficulties of navigating U.S. 
permitting law. Does the challenge Micron faces when building a 
facility like the one you are working on in New York--chip 
makers--would it make the chip makers reconsider the United 
States?
    And if so, how could the U.S. be--could it be leaving 
opportunities on the table by failing to update NEPA?
    Mr. Bhatia. So certainly we have, you know, experienced 
delays, and the duplicative nature of the process has----
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Yes.
    Mr. Bhatia [continuing]. Been challenged. And it is a 
challenge for, I think, any company who has to go through the 
NEPA process, whether in semiconductors or in other areas, and 
there will be other NEPA projects, including in--potentially in 
energy and other sectors where, you know, I think that there is 
a potential for some streamlining to have Federal and State 
processes to be harmonized so that we don't have to go through 
the extended time.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Yes, it is duplicative. I mean, very much 
so. Thank you, sir.
    Mr. Wang, one thing I really love is government efficiency. 
And I was inspired by your testimony--by your recommendation of 
implementing AI applications for the Government. It could free 
up public employees to think more strategically and could 
reduce regulatory backlogs.
    So how could the administration use AI to lower taxpayer 
burdens and increase government efficiency?
    Mr. Wang. The opportunities for AI to aid in government 
efficiency are immense, and this is one of the areas where I 
think AI can have tremendous impact very, very quickly, 
actually.
    You know, this goes to one of the things that we are 
talking a lot about in the industry, which is moving towards an 
agentic government. So how can we enable AI agents to start 
speeding up and streamlining a lot of the processes that we 
have within the Government so that they go from years to weeks, 
or potentially even days?
    So a few examples of that. You know, I think about how we 
can use AI to cut down the time it takes to handle veteran 
healthcare paperwork, or an AI system that could vastly improve 
fraud detection at the IRS. And then, you know, I think the 
combination--you know, if you look at every single agency, 
there is immense opportunity.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. Yes.
    Mr. Wang. And you can go across--you know, we see this in 
the DoD, who we work very closely with. We were working with 
them recently, we have been deploying a system called Thunder 
Forge, which is a system to using--for using AI for military 
planning and wargaming, a process that currently is extremely 
manually intensive. And we all know that, to be competitive in 
the future, we need to be more efficient.
    So there is just a wealth of opportunity, which is one of 
the reasons why we recommend that, ideally, every Federal 
agency should have some flagship AI programs to start 
implementing and getting into the process of utilizing AI and 
AI agents to streamline more of their processes. And 
ultimately, if we do that today, we will reap the benefits in 
the years to come.
    Mrs. Harshbarger. You are right. I see that already in some 
of the things we have already found with fraud, waste, and 
abuse, and some other--we don't even communicate within an 
agency, for heaven's sakes. So AI would absolutely benefit.
    You keep doing your work, young man, OK?
    All right. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentlelady yields. The Chair recognizes Mr. 
Veasey from Texas for his 5 minutes of questioning.
    Mr. Veasey. Thank you, sir, and I think this is amazing 
that we are here having this conversation today.
    Right now in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, we are literally 
becoming a hub for advanced manufacturing and AI innovation, 
and you can see it in all the new facilities that are opening 
up. You know, we have had the Facebook data center for a long 
time now, but we just--we have groundbreaking on several other 
new centers in the Alliance Corridor near Crowley and near 
Benbrook in Fort Worth. And this is really amazing, because you 
can see the new facilities going up and the jobs that they are 
bringing along with them, which is very, very important. It is 
generational, and it is really helping the DFW area lead the 
charge in this area.
    But as we lean into the future, we have to be clear-eyed 
about what comes with it, because AI just doesn't run on code, 
and it runs on power, something that we talk a lot about on 
this committee. And with a massive growth of data centers and 
AI infrastructure that is happening right now, it is putting a 
tremendous strain on the grid. And we have to get ahead of 
this, or consumers could end up footing the bill on this 
through higher prices and tighter capacity and more volatility.
    And so we can't treat energy demand from AI like an 
afterthought. We have got to be smart. We have got to keep the 
lights on. We have got to keep the bills affordable, and we 
have got to keep the grid resilient, especially in places like 
Texas that's a huge part of our country's economy, but also 
because we have already seen by what not investing in the grid 
can look like in 2021 during Winter Storm Uri. Because if AI 
moves forward without guardrails for jobs, for privacy, and for 
families, we really risk turning a lot of this promise into 
disruption.
    And I had a question for Mr. Turk: Do you believe the 
Department of Energy or Congress needs to take more aggressive 
steps to plan for and manage the energy load coming from AI 
infrastructure?
    And are there policies that you would recommend to ensure 
grid reliability and, again, affordability?
    Mr. Turk. Absolutely is the short answer. And fortunately, 
Congress provided a whole range of tax incentives, grants, and 
loans that are having a real impact right now on making prices 
more affordable not only for AI companies but also for 
consumers across the country. And it is helping to improve our 
grid reliability also.
    I know there is an active discussion going on right now in 
Congress: Do you all repeal those tax incentives that are 
lowering costs and allowing us to bring electrons on more 
quickly? And we look at what type of electrons are going to be 
brought on more--most quickly in our country. It is solar, it 
is wind, it is storage. That is what the experts, that is what 
the utility CEOs are saying.
    Unfortunately, right now we have a backlog on natural gas 
turbines right now. That is making it very challenging to bring 
natural gas on as quickly as some AI companies might want it 
to. So if you want to bring on electrons quickly, keep those 
tax incentives, keep those grants, keep those loans in place so 
that we can do it quickly, we can do it affordably, and that 
reduces costs for everybody, including for consumers.
    Mr. Veasey. Yes, absolutely, and it keeps America ahead by 
us investing in those things.
    You were at DOE when the CHIPS and Science Act passed, a 
law that is helping bring semiconductors and AI-related 
manufacturing back to U.S. soil. If those incentives are rolled 
back, do you think companies would continue to invest in 
domestic manufacturing, or would they move those operations 
overseas?
    Mr. Turk. I think Dr. Schmidt described what happened, 
unfortunately, a decade, two decades ago, when we let those 
manufacturing facilities slip out of our hands and go to other 
countries. And the CHIPS and Science Act was Congress working 
with the administration to step up and say we need to bring 
that back, and it is going to take some upfront capital. It is 
a perfectly appropriate role for the Government to say this is 
a critical technology, we are going to invest, we are going to 
encourage, and sent a bunch of private-sector investment to 
have those chips manufactured here in the U.S.
    So the short answer to your question is, if we were to some 
reason slow down the CHIPS Act or rescind that funding, we are 
going to be right back where we were, which is not where we 
need to be.
    Mr. Veasey. Yes. If for some reason we didn't fully 
implement CHIPS Act in this area, what would that mean for 
America competitively, particularly when we start talking about 
what countries like China are doing?
    Mr. Turk. So it is not only the economic opportunities that 
producing the chips here have for communities across the 
country. There is a real national security implication.
    Mr. Veasey. Yes.
    Mr. Turk. Chips, along with data and power and human 
intelligence, fuels this AI revolution we are in the midst of. 
If you don't have those chips and you are beholden to other 
countries and other supply chains, that is a real 
vulnerability.
    Mr. Veasey. Yes, which means China rules the world. Very 
scary.
    Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Joyce. The gentleman yields. The Chair recognizes Mr. 
Bentz from Oregon for his 5 minutes of questioning.
    Mr. Bentz. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to all of you 
for being here.
    Is there a reason that we should have a more organized 
approach, Mr. Wang, to the approach that we are using to try to 
achieve this win in artificial intelligence?
    And before you answer that, tell me what a win is in 
artificial intelligence. I know, when I was reading the 
Oppenheimer book, and ``Turing's Cathedral,'' and other such 
literature--well, more Oppenheimer--the goal was a bomb. What 
is our goal in AI?
    Mr. Wang. AI is, as has been mentioned, a unique technology 
because it has such broad-reaching implications. It can be 
utilized to empower our economy and enable our industries to 
grow. It can be used for science in accelerating scientific 
discovery, helping us do things such as, you know, solving 
fusion or finding a cure to cancer. And it can also be used 
for--as a weapon, and used in military contexts.
    Mr. Bentz. And I know I asked you to tell me if our 
approach is the proper approach, and we will get back to that 
in a second. But as Lincoln said, the way you get things done 
is to change public opinion. And the great thing about this 
hearing today is what we are trying to say is this is an 
existential issue. This is so important we need to waive 
environmental rules, we need to push things aside, we need to 
create exemptions. We need to get past this haystack of 
obstacles that we have created for ourselves to protect things. 
But it takes forever now to do anything here, and we don't have 
forever.
    So what I am really asking is, make the best argument you 
can to America right this minute about why this is an 
existential, truly absolutely necessary thing for us to set 
these other important things aside. And it has to be more--and 
maybe it can't be. But your best argument. I am going to ask 
everybody else the same question, but go ahead.
    Mr. Wang. If we fall behind the Chinese Communist Party, 
this technology will enable the CCP, as well as other 
authoritarian regimes, to utilize the technology to, over time, 
effectively take over the world. You know, they will be able to 
export their ideologies, they will be able to utilize it as a 
military technology to invade other countries, and they will be 
able to use it for effectively spreading their regime in a more 
broad way across the world.
    Mr. Bentz. And so what is missing, of course, is--you say, 
``use it.'' The definition of ``it'' is going to become more 
and more important. So people actually can grasp--this broad 
phrase of AI as so general.
    Your turn.
    Mr. Bhatia. Well, I think it is really critical that we not 
only maintain our leadership in terms of the algorithms and the 
data structure approach to being able to enable the AI 
applications, but absolutely the hardware, semiconductors, 
logic, memory. These are--it is absolutely critical that we are 
able to maintain our advantage----
    Mr. Bentz. They are critical. But what I am trying to get 
at here is public opinion has to understand why they are 
critical----
    Mr. Bhatia. Yes.
    Mr. Bentz [continuing]. Why it is absolutely essential that 
we win this race to a goal that is not as clear as I would 
like.
    Dr. Schmidt.
    Dr. Schmidt. In 5 to 10 years, every American citizen will 
have the equivalent of an Einstein on their phone or in their 
pocket. This is an enormous increase in power for humans. What 
if that Einstein is a Chinese one?
    Mr. Bentz. And I am going to shift back to Mr. Wang for 
just a minute because of, frankly, your age as compared to 
those others on the panel. So if everybody is going to have 
Einstein available, how would you suggest to teachers that they 
address this in the classroom?
    Mr. Wang. I think it is important. Frankly, I think AI will 
be an immense opportunity for humans and for industries to be 
able to leverage as a core technology. Our view is that, you 
know, in many ways our role--you know, humans' role will go 
towards supervising and managing these AI systems, these AI 
agents, if you will, in a--and give ourselves, frankly, more 
leverage.
    So I think the key for teachers and for education systems 
is to teach people how to leverage AI systems, how to use them. 
You know, how do you embrace the technology as a tool, as 
something that enables you to do more things, better things, 
you know, more ambitious things?
    Mr. Bentz. And that would mean that all of our teachers 
have to understand how to use this new tool.
    And I am going to be out of time, but I was interested, Mr. 
Turk, in the remarks you made about trying to recover and bring 
back to the United States manufacturing capability. I know that 
Micron is the only memory chip maker we have left here, and so 
I think the tariff concept is exactly that, to try to, in some 
fashion, get us back to where we need to be as we watched all 
those different, important jobs flee, now doing our best to get 
them back. And the real question is how to do it.
    And I am out of time, but it is certainly incredibly 
important. Thank you. Thank you all.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Evans [presiding]. The gentleman yields. The Chair now 
recognizes the gentlelady from Massachusetts, Mrs. Trahan.
    Mrs. Trahan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Congress must lead in advancing a proconsumer, pro-
innovation AI agenda. Clear guardrails and regulatory certainty 
will fuel, not hinder, that innovation. So to understand what 
that looks like for everyday Americans, let's just start at the 
beginning of the AI pipeline with research and what we need to 
be doing to set the conditions for AI capacity.
    Foundational research drove breakthroughs like transistors, 
the internet, and large language models. Our adversaries get 
this. While Federal R&D funding is being cut, the Chinese 
Government is scaling its investments. For example, China is 
outspending us by more than double in fusion energy research 
and commercialization.
    Dr. Schmidt, in your testimony you noted the importance of 
ramping up fusion energy research. Commonwealth Fusion is in 
the district that I get to represent. The fusion and AI leaders 
that I regularly speak with tell me how important public-
private partnerships are for advancing new technology and 
moving towards commercialization.
    How important is a strong Federal research enterprise for 
domestic innovation, including infusion and in AI?
    Dr. Schmidt. Commonwealth is an example of American 
exceptionalism. As you know, their development of these 
incredibly powerful batteries--or, sorry, magnets, excuse me--
that was done in research at MIT shows you the path. You do it 
at MIT, you do a spinout. It was done collaboratively with MIT, 
with other investors. People have put billions of dollars into 
Commonwealth, including myself. I am also the chairman of a 
competitor company on the West Coast. That is how the American 
system works.
    Mrs. Trahan. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. The current 15 percent indirect cost issue is 
hurting American science, and it needs to be addressed. If 
there are issues in specific programs, do it surgically. The 
damage that is being done to American research, broadly 
speaking, will harm the country for the next 50 years.
    Mrs. Trahan. Thank----
    Dr. Schmidt. This is the time to reverse this.
    Mrs. Trahan. Your answer is exactly why the Federal 
Government must bolster and not squander its research capacity. 
Whether it is pushing away international researchers or gutting 
science agencies like NIH or the National Science Foundation, 
undermining research, the first step in the AI pipeline, 
threatens our ability to win, which I believe we all want to 
do.
    I would like to turn to AI development, which depends on 
computer chips. In 2022 Congress passed the CHIPS and Science 
Act to bring chip production back home. China sees the same 
strategic value and is implementing a massive state-sponsored 
campaign to strengthen its semiconductor supply chain. Mr. 
Bhatia, companies like Micron have received billions through 
the CHIPS Act to expand chip factories in the United States. 
How important is it that the Federal Government fully implement 
the CHIPS Act to ensure that Micron and other firms are able to 
bolster their domestic manufacturing capabilities?
    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you, Congresswoman, and you are right 
that, you know, our Asian competitors do have, you know, large 
cost gaps, cost deltas versus our operations here in the United 
States--35 to 45 percent range, depending on where in Asia--and 
those countries are also incentivizing their domestic 
companies, which creates competitive disadvantages for the U.S. 
companies.
    And it is absolutely essential that we are able to extend 
and expand the investment tax credits that were passed as part 
of that legislation so that the spring of new facilities that 
have started can continue and bloom over the next decade.
    Mrs. Trahan. Yes, thank you. You know, President Trump says 
he wants to revive American manufacturing, but he is gutting 
the CHIPS program office and floating repeal of the CHIPS Act 
altogether, and that just doesn't add up.
    Finally, on AI deployment, to benefit from AI people need 
protection. AI isn't flawless. It can mislead, it can make 
false predictions, it can expose personal data. Yes, we must 
beat China, but we don't need to become China. America must 
lead with its values, especially privacy. Our tech laws should 
reflect that.
    Mr. Wang, in your testimony you affirm the need for 
effective AI guardrails. This committee has repeatedly come 
close to passing a Federal privacy standard based on data 
minimization and transparency. How important are privacy 
protections as a guardrail for AI?
    Mr. Wang. You know, we strongly support Congress's desire 
to get data privacy legislation done. Ultimately, what we find 
critically important is that--again, I have mentioned this a 
few times--that we have one Federal framework so that we don't 
have a patchwork of various frameworks throughout the country.
    Mrs. Trahan. Yes, this committee has a lot of work to do. 
Thank you so much for your testimony.
    Mr. Evans. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentlelady from Iowa, Mrs. Miller-Meeks.
    Mrs. Miller-Meeks. Thank you very much to the Chair and 
ranking member for holding this extremely important hearing on 
AI, energy, and global competitiveness.
    Iowa's 1st District has become an important contributor to 
our Nation's AI infrastructure. In February, Cedar Rapids 
announced its largest economic development investment in the 
city's history, a $750 million partnership between the city, 
Alliant Energy, and QTS to build a major data center campus. 
The project will bring hundreds of construction jobs and high-
tech positions, while featuring innovative, water-free cooling 
systems that address resource concerns.
    It is also home to Azure's largest supercomputers, which 
Microsoft built for OpenAI to train breakthrough AI models. 
This cutting-edge infrastructure in our State's heartland 
demonstrates how communities beyond traditional tech hubs can 
play vital roles in advancing AI innovation.
    As we examine these technologies, I am particularly 
interested in how we ensure reliable power generation for these 
high-demand facilities. Iowa's diverse energy portfolio 
positions us well, but we need significant additional 
generation capacity nationwide to meet growing electricity 
demands for AI, domestic manufacturing, and residential demand. 
I am eager to explore how we maintain America's energy 
competitive edge, and especially against China's targeted 
effort to become the global AI leader by 2030. The decisions 
that we make today about regulation infrastructure will 
determine whether the United States maintains its leadership 
position and how critical this is, as has been mentioned 
earlier.
    Mr. Wang, I was impressed by MIT's AI innovation when I 
visited there a few years ago, but concerned to learn about the 
CCP's whole-of-government approach to accelerating Chinese AI 
capabilities. With the recent emergence of models like 
DeepSeek, how would you characterize our current competitive 
position against China, specifically in the areas of data and--
I think you have answered this partly--computing algorithms and 
workforce development?
    Mr. Wang. It is an important question. And, you know, I 
always--you know, AI really does boil down to its ingredients, 
and these ingredients are the ones that you referenced: 
computational power, data, algorithms, and ultimately the 
workforce that we have to support it.
    When it comes to computational power, we are still ahead as 
a country, but we have to be very diligent to ensure that we 
stay ahead. We are lucky that the leading chips in the world 
are Nvidia chips, some of the chips from Micron and others, 
which are the forefront of the industry and the envy of the 
world. But we need to maintain those leads, and we need to 
think deeply about how we do that.
    When it comes to algorithmic--the algorithms, you know, I 
would actually say we are probably on par at this point with 
China. You know, we used to have a meaningful lead. Most of the 
most innovative algorithms are American innovations, but they 
have been very quickly replicated. And at this point it is not 
clear that we have a lead.
    When it comes to data, this is where China has an 
immeasurable lead. They have invested in it for years, you 
know, nearly a decade of investment into data sets to fuel 
their AI development. This started with their global 
surveillance programs and when they, you know, instituted 
large-scale AI for facial recognition and other technologies 
throughout the country. And it has continued to today.
    We need to figure out, as a country, how we achieve data 
dominance and how we can do that both in the public sector as 
well as across the private sector.
    And then lastly, on the workforce, this is an important 
point. We, as a country--again, the workforce is what fuels 
every component of this--of these sets of innovations, so we 
need to ensure that we, as a country, are setting up the right 
programs to empower the AI workforce of tomorrow. Thank you.
    Mrs. Miller-Meeks. Mr. Bhatia, in your testimony you stated 
that the U.S. is not on track to keep pace with projected 
energy demand and that, unless the U.S. makes substantial 
policy shifts, access to affordable and reliable power will 
begin constraining America's manufacturing renaissance.
    During our hearing with the Nation's grid operators last 
month, they expressed similar concerns. Your testimony 
specifically highlighted the Boardman to Hemingway transmission 
line project that has faced nearly 20 years of permitting 
delays.
    Can you elaborate on how these permitting challenges 
directly impact Micron's expansion plans and competitiveness, 
compared to China's ability to rapidly deploy energy 
infrastructure?
    Mr. Bhatia. Thank you, Congresswoman.
    The Boardman to Hemingway line is just an example. It is a 
project that is, I think, 300 miles long and has been on the 
drawing board for almost 20 years now, and it is--we were 
joking earlier that it is approaching its 21st birthday almost, 
in terms of how--when it was proposed until today, and still 
hundreds of millions of dollars spent on permitting.
    It is a project that does span three different States to be 
able to connect transmission in the Pacific Northwest. And 
because of those kinds of regulations between the different 
States as well as Federal oversight issues and regulations, we 
have not been able to see it even get started. And that is just 
one example of, I am sure, many, many other examples of 
projects which really are needed to be able to bring the grid 
resiliency that others on the panel have talked about and that 
I have called for as well.
    Mrs. Miller-Meeks. Thank you. I have a question for Dr. 
Schmidt on fusion, but I am out of time so I will submit it for 
the record, if you could please answer it. But I hadn't heard 
fusion mentioned, so I wanted to get that in.
    Thank you, I yield back.
    Mr. Evans. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentlelady from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to 
our witnesses for joining us today and offering your testimony.
    You know, this--the crux of what we are here to discuss 
today is where a lot of where the rubber meets the road when it 
comes to AI and how this actually manifests in the world, and 
the real problems that we are going to have to square and 
solve, particularly as it comes to energy and energy 
consumption.
    Mr. Schmidt--Dr. Schmidt, you have written in the past 
about the energy consumption of AI. You mentioned in this 
article here on Project Syndicate that ``AI guzzles 
electricity. A single ChatGPT query requires 10 times as much 
as a conventional web search.'' And in your opening statement 
today you said something very fascinating and compelling, I 
think, about the actual scale of the energy consumption that we 
are confronting here when you talked about gigawatts and 
nuclear facilities.
    Could you repeat that for me very quickly?
    Dr. Schmidt. So some math here is--and thank you, 
Congresswoman--the typical data center--sorry, the typical 
nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt. We have roughly 90 of them. 
We are talking about 90 gigawatts in the next 3 to 5 years 
needed in America to maintain this leadership. And you put 
the----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Ninety gigawatts for the AI data 
centers?
    Dr. Schmidt. For the United States. And the reason I want 
to emphasize this is (1) this is insane, in terms of a build. 
Why do we need it? Because we are going from the ChatGPT that 
you know, which is language-to-language----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Right.
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. To reasoning systems that do 
thousands and thousands----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. What they do is called 
reinforcement learning. They go back and forth and back and 
forth.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Correct.
    Dr. Schmidt. They are not as efficient as our brains, and 
they discover new things.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And so we are--and I completely hear you 
on the scale of the technology that we are dealing with here. 
And going back to that 90 gigawatt number, that is the 
equivalent of--to what you mentioned here, 90 nuclear power 
plants, just that we would be developing--or the equivalent of 
that just for AI data centers alone.
    And of course, we are not talking about building 90 nuclear 
power plants. We are talking about building that capacity, 
which, before us here today, to be frank, and with the current 
administration, is fossil fuel infrastructure. Of course, we 
have talked about mixed energy loads, but with the investments 
and what we are seeing in terms of what is getting defunded and 
what is getting funded and what is being advocated for, this is 
largely fossil fuel infrastructure, and particularly methane--
methane being 28 times more potent in contributing to the 
climate crisis than even traditional CO2.
    But what we are also seeing is that in the administration's 
moves to massively invest in AI, we have also seen the fossil 
fuel market be tightly associated with this. In fact, the day 
after Trump announced his $500 billion AI Stargate initiative, 
gas prices in the market went up 5.3 percent. And after the 
DeepSeek announcement from China, which announced that they 
used--consumed 50 to 75 percent less energy, gas prices fell 8 
percent.
    And so, increasingly we are seeing fossil fuel market 
speculation seeming to start to intertwine with the development 
of the AI industry. And this is a problem for working people, 
and this is the part that we need to square. In New York, Con 
Edison bills--that is our kind of local energy provider--are up 
for--some families are paying $1,200 a month to pay their 
energy bill. And we are here talking about massive energy 
investments not to lower their bills, but for, ultimately, 
infrastructure that is privately owned.
    Mr. Turk, if a utility invests in a new substation so that 
gas generation for an AI data center can connect to the grid, 
will that utility typically pass those costs on via its 
electrical rates?
    Mr. Turk. Well, I think you have hit the nail on the head 
here, right? We don't just need new electrons for AI. We need 
them for consumers, right? And we need to have downward 
pressure on prices, not the opposite.
    And so that is why we need to keep our eye on the ball, 
including and especially with the IRA tax credits. What we are 
talking about is average households paying $200 more per year 
if those tax credits are repealed. For citizens in New York it 
is $400 per year more.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And so I think--so--but at--the core of 
the question--without--you know, if we currently go on this 
path, the increases in that energy consumption from AI get 
passed on through the bills.
    Mr. Turk. That is exactly right. It is a competitive 
environment. We have increasing demand. If we don't have a 
range of resources, especially solar and storage, which are the 
cheapest resources to bring on quickly right now in our 
country, if we increase the prices of that, everyone is going 
to feel it----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And----
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. And consumers in particular.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And fossil fuel prices are certainly 
more volatile than renewables.
    Mr. Turk. That is right. That is right.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Evans. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentlelady from Florida, Ms. Lee.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Wang, I would like to go back to your testimony of 
earlier today, specifically toward the end, where one of the 
things that you touched on was how we, as Congress, might 
empower and utilize NIST to help us in our promotion of 
artificial intelligence.
    One of the things that you mention is that NIST needs more 
resources to be able to complete relevant measurement science, 
such as standards and frameworks. Would you tell us a little 
bit more about--elaborate on those standards and frameworks, 
and what you think NIST could be doing that would be 
constructive?
    Mr. Wang. Ultimately, as AI develops as a technology, it is 
very important that we have what we call test and evaluation 
regimes, that we are able to both test and evaluate the 
performance of these AI systems, understand their limitations, 
as well as do--as other of the panelists have mentioned, do 
extensive red teaming on these AI systems, understand how an 
adversary would be able to utilize AI or hack into our AI 
systems to harm us.
    You know, this work is incredibly important and serves as a 
foundation that we can use to export American AI standards 
globally. And this is--you know, this is really the strategic 
move for America, which is how do we ensure that the way that 
we think about AI--both embedded with our values and our 
democratic values, as well as how we think AI should be 
developed globally--is exported as broadly as possible 
throughout the world.
    You know, we saw, I think, in the last few generations of 
technology the Chinese Communist Party actually be quite 
strategic on this, the Belt and Road initiatives, their use of 
Huawei technology for 5G. You know, they have in many recent 
developments, major developments in advanced technology, they 
focus on exporting their technology and making sure that 
Chinese technology is the global standard.
    We need to do the opposite with AI. And the beauty of the 
situation that we are currently in is that many, many 
countries--you know, Japan, France, the UK, India--have all 
established AI safety institutes that are all looking towards 
the testing that we are doing in the United States and the 
standards that we are enforcing in the United States for them 
to institute their own standards.
    Ms. Lee. If we are able to develop and then effectively 
export that measurement science, would you elaborate on how it 
is that you think that will help promote democratic values?
    And similarly, if we fail to do so, what do you anticipate 
that we will see if we do not create those standards and share 
them globally?
    Mr. Wang. Ultimately, you know, just as a simple example, 
let's say that we institute as part of our test and evaluation 
systems certain guardrails around factuality, so the AI 
systems, you know--or certain guardrails around, you know, 
whether or not the AI could be used to create bioweapons or 
whatnot. That would totally eliminate certain classes of risks 
of a CCP model being used globally to, you know, perpetuate 
their ideologies or perpetuate, you know, perpetuate 
instability globally.
    You know, there is--we have an immense ability to ensure 
that the United--that the American view of AI, which is a 
democratic technology that can be utilized by the people, for 
the people to ultimately empower industries, that that is how 
the entire world views the technology. And it is a fixed window 
of opportunity. We will not have this opportunity forever. At 
some point, all of the other countries will start instituting 
their own AI standards, and so we need to act quickly.
    Ms. Lee. One of the things that you mentioned is your 
assessment that NIST would benefit from having additional 
resources from Congress in order to be able to undertake this 
activity. Do you have a perspective on how that looks, whether 
it is dollars, whether it is people, if there is a certain type 
of workforce they require? Do you have any perspective on how 
we could better equip NIST to be ready to do this?
    Mr. Wang. Yes. I think all of the above are important. I 
think ensuring that they have the dollars, ensuring that they 
have the headcount. And one of the things that I think is very 
critical is that they are able to bring in and leverage 
cutting-edge AI talent as a part of NIST to help define these 
standards globally, because these are very advanced technical 
questions that need to be answered, but ones that will have 
immense benefit to America and our economy long into the future 
if we succeed.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Evans. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Auchincloss.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Thank you, Chairman.
    Dr. Schmidt, it is good to see you again. You had come and 
spoken to the Select Committee on China, and you were 
elucidating then, and I have enjoyed hearing your testimony 
today as well. I was hoping you could tell the committee a 
little bit about a famous Google paper in 2017 called, 
``Attention is All You Need.''
    Now, you were no longer executive chairman at that point, 
but you had been stewarding the company for the 15 years before 
that, and I am sure is well aware of how that publication came 
to be. Can you give us, like, a minute backstory?
    Dr. Schmidt. I was, in fact, still executive chairman. And 
the interesting thing about that paper is when it came out I 
didn't even notice it. That shows you--asleep at the wheel, or 
something.
    The six authors all became hugely famous because they came 
up with a way of building scalable intelligence. Before that, 
the RNN and CNN--not media CNN, the convolutional neural 
network--architectures were slow, and the ``Attention is All 
You Need'' allowed you to essentially devolve the computation 
into subdividable things which could scale infinitely. The 
transformer paper--and the ``T'' in GPT is transformer--is the 
underlying architecture----
    Mr. Auchincloss. Right.
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. That has enabled this explosion.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Am I right, that that transformer 
architecture in the 2010s was--really came--became coherent 
around the problem of natural language translation?
    Dr. Schmidt. Not really. The transformer architecture was 
essentially a refactoring of the technologies of the time into 
a more scalable architecture, specifically that you could have 
federated computing--you would have lots of different computers 
doing things at the same time is the easiest way to explain it. 
And it was a real breakthrough. They will ultimately win the 
equivalent of Nobel Prizes for it.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Well, I was looking, I was doing some 
research about the--what has been called the Transformer Eight, 
the eight----
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mr. Auchincloss [continuing]. The authors of that 
publication. And they are almost like the PayPal Mafia of AI. I 
mean, what they have gone on to do is remarkable.
    Here is what else is remarkable. Of those eight, seven are 
immigrants.
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mr. Auchincloss. And the eighth is the grandson of refugees 
who came to the United States fleeing persecution. In fact, 
two-thirds of top AI startups are founded by immigrants, and 
most Ph.D.-level AI talent in the United States is foreign-
born.
    Dr. Schmidt, can you describe the impact of immigration on 
AI's--America's AI competitiveness?
    Dr. Schmidt. I was in a conversation last week in London, 
where people were talking about people leaving the United 
States AI companies to move to London because they couldn't 
work here anymore. That is insane. It is so counter to American 
national security. It is, like, crazy.
    From my perspective, the most important thing America can 
do is look for high skills immigration. These--to describe how 
hard this stuff is, these are Ph.D.s in math. I have no idea 
what they are doing, and they are inventing these incredible 
algorithms.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. We need all of them in America, every single 
one of them. Physics, chemistry, you name it, we need them all.
    Mr. Auchincloss. And yet the Trump administration is 
currently eroding due process for immigrants in this country, 
whether they have green cards or student visas. They are 
deporting students, they are creating a climate of fear and 
anxiety on some of our best campuses.
    Go ahead, sir.
    Dr. Schmidt. It is actually worse--we agree. It is actually 
worse. People are being thrown out of the universities that are 
doing AI research. Universities have shut down their hiring 
pipeline. And they need AI professors, and the people will 
otherwise go to industry. So the damage being done to the 
universities is really, really profound.
    It is very, very important that we understand that American 
leadership in the--in research, which you understand very well 
from where you are, is the cornerstone of our future. We will 
not get there. Meanwhile, China is pouring an enormous amount 
of money into the same groups.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Do you think, if the Trump posture towards 
immigrants--student immigrants in particular, universities more 
broadly--if that persists, can America beat China in AI?
    Dr. Schmidt. No. In fact, when I was--you all appointed me 
to be the chairman of the National Security Committee on--
Commission on AI, and we looked at this very carefully. What 
was interesting is that Chinese-born contributors were often 
part of the key papers. They were not the lead author, but they 
were part of it. If you would get rid of those people--and in 
particular they go to China, right?--the leadership literally 
moves. I would much rather have them be here.
    And people say, well, you know, they are criminals. They 
are not criminals. They want to be in the United States.
    Mr. Auchincloss. Right.
    Dr. Schmidt. If they are criminals, arrest them.
    Mr. Auchincloss. They are Americans by choice.
    Not only is Donald Trump providing a massive opening for 
China with his xenophobic immigration policy, he is also 
providing a massive opening for China with his trade wars 
that's bringing Europe and China closer together.
    With that I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Evans. The gentleman yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentleman from California, Mr. Obernolte.
    Mr. Obernolte. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I 
would like to thank Chairman Guthrie and the Energy and 
Commerce Committee for having this hearing on a topic that is 
very close to my heart, and something I think is of immense 
national consequence to our economy and our country.
    Mr. Wang, it is great to see you again. In your testimony, 
you were talking about the steps that must be taken to ensure 
U.S. continued leadership in AI. And I was very thankful that 
you had some very specific asks of Congress and the 
administration. And one of those was that we adopt a regulatory 
framework that is sector-specific and use case based.
    And I wanted to ask you, could you elaborate a little bit 
on what you mean by that and how we would go about enacting it?
    Mr. Wang. Yes. So ultimately, what we need as a country is 
to ensure that--from a technology development standpoint, that 
we do not slow down. We need to ensure that AI as a technology 
moves forward as quickly as possible. And that includes 
embracing the technology and ensuring that we have the--we have 
room to innovate.
    But the application of that technology towards certain 
sectors or certain specific use cases in the economy are areas 
where I think, you know, there probably needs to be some level 
of regulation, or at least some level of guardrails in place. 
You know, these could be industries like the medical industry, 
the pharmaceutical industry, the financial services industry, 
and others--you know, industries that already have some degree 
of regulation to protect consumers and protect Americans.
    You know, we can--in many cases, we can utilize those same 
provisions or those same regulations, and then there might be 
some cases where there are some gaps.
    Mr. Obernolte. All right. The Artificial Intelligence Task 
Force in the House issued a report in December that made 
exactly that same recommendation, and I think the exact finding 
was that we regulate tools, not--outcomes, not tools. And AI is 
a very powerful tool, but it is a tool. If we focus our 
regulation on outcomes, then we can capture all the different 
uses of the tool.
    You also talked about the need for a single Federal 
standard for regulation, and Congressman Dunn was on the way to 
asking you about that and unfortunately ran out of time. So I 
wanted to give you a little bit of space to explain what you 
meant by that.
    Mr. Wang. Yes. So, you know, as an AI company--and I think 
what we ultimately want as a country is to ensure that our 
industry can continue developing advanced AI systems and 
continue driving American leadership. You know, the worst-case 
scenario for us is actually that there are 50 different--that 
every State adopts a different regulatory standard, and we have 
to, you know, operationally comply with 50 different regulatory 
standards.
    I mean, it quickly becomes impossible, especially as you 
consider, you know, in a lot of cases the way that we develop 
AI is we develop, you know, one large model, and then we start 
applying that model in all sorts of different industries and 
use cases and jurisdictions. And so we need, as an industry and 
as a country, one clear Federal standard, whatever it may be. 
But we need one--we need clarity as to one Federal standard and 
have preemption to prevent this outcome where you have 50 
different standards.
    Just to put a finer point on this, you know, we do not want 
our American companies spending all their time figuring out how 
to comply with every State's standards, whereas the Chinese 
models and the Chinese companies will just race ahead on 
innovation.
    Mr. Obernolte. Right. That is another conclusion that we 
completely agree with you. In the task force report we had a 
whole chapter on this issue.
    And let me just point out the fact that, since then, just 
in the last couple of months, we have at last count 958 bills 
pending in State legislatures across the country on the topic 
of AI regulation, and I am sure it is going to grow to be 
several thousand just in this year. If we allow this regulatory 
landscape that complicated to exist, I actually think that 
Scale is probably well suited to that because you have got the 
legal sophistication to deal with that.
    But who does not have that sophistication are two people at 
Caltech--see what I did there; not MIT, Caltech--trying to 
start the next Scale. So I think we definitely--we have a 
limited amount of legislative runway to be able to get that 
problem solved before the States get too far ahead.
    And one last question for you, Mr. Wang. You had mentioned 
the need to establish a national AI data reserve. Could you 
talk a little bit about why that is so important?
    Mr. Wang. If we--you know, ultimately, national security is 
the responsibility of the Government. And our Government's 
data, particularly our DoD's data and our data relating to 
national security, is so vital and valuable to ensuring that 
our AI systems are able to defend our country, defend our men 
and women, and ultimately ensure national security, broadly 
speaking.
    So the necessity of the national AI data reserve is so 
that, you know, in 10 years, 5 to 10 years, we are not sitting 
here seeing how advanced the Chinese systems for defense and 
intelligence and, you know, cyber warfare and other systems are 
because they have an integrated data approach versus our 
systems, which would be dramatically behind.
    Mr. Obernolte. Well, thank you very much for your 
testimony. Sorry I didn't get to the other witnesses. I have a 
million questions. We will submit that for the record.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Evans. The gentleman yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Carter.
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank 
you to our witnesses for joining us today. I am glad we are 
discussing the need to upgrade our infrastructure for the 21st 
century economy and provide for all Americans' access to 
cutting-edge technologies championed by our witnesses here.
    In January, Louisiana became the first State to secure 
Federal approval for deploying $1.3 billion in broadband equity 
access and deployment, otherwise known as BEAD, funding. This 
achievement highlights the bipartisan nature of Louisiana's 
commitment to universal connectivity and to set standards for 
States regarding broadband access.
    The State's BEAD rollout plan began under the Democratic 
Governor John Bel Edwards and was completed under Republican 
Governor Jeff Landry, who called it a generational investment 
that will create thousands of jobs, drive billions of dollars 
in economic growth, and transform Louisiana's communities in 
all 64 parishes. The State's plan will connect approximately 
140,000 locations to high-speed Internet through funding 
awarded to 20 internet service providers, with nearly 70 
percent of the funds awarded to Louisiana companies.
    More than 90,000 of these locations were set to transition 
from zero connectivity to futureproof broadband fiber, although 
these broadband investments will drive significant economic 
growth for the State, creating approximately 10,000 new jobs 
and generating an estimated 2 to 3 billion dollars in new 
revenue for Louisiana companies.
    However, since the Trump administration took office, just a 
week after Louisiana received approval--its final approval to 
move forward on its proposal--the Commerce Department has 
withheld final funding to the approval that would have 
otherwise had shovels in the ground installing high-speed 
broadband infrastructure today--not aspirational, but now. The 
unexpected delay has stalled progress, frozen investments made 
by small internet service providers and contractors, and left 
rural communities still waiting on the promise of broadband 
access.
    Just recently, Meta announced that they were building a 
roughly $10 billion data center in rural Richland Parish in 
Louisiana, an area that would have benefited from the State's 
broadband rollout. In fact, over 600 households within a 10-
mile circumference of the new Meta facility would be connected 
via BEAD. We also expect that--around the data center to grow 
as the facility brings in hundreds of workers, including 
skilled technical specialists.
    The delays around BEAD rollout mean that these workers 
for--the $10 billion advanced data center may lack high-speed 
broadband at home, threatening yet another huge investment in 
my home State. The freeze in BEAD funds is yet another example 
of how the Trump administration has shown chaos and uncertainty 
for businesses trying to make major investments in technology 
and energy, on top of the past week of economic turmoil and 
worldwide market crashes. This is unacceptable.
    Mr.--is it ``Ba-ye-ta''? It is close enough?
    Mr. Bhatia. Close enough.
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. How important is quality of life 
for your workers when you are looking to grow your operations 
in new areas?
    Would considering making major investments in the area 
where your workers are, and their families lack access to the 
internet be a major factor?
    Mr. Bhatia. Absolutely. We would like to ensure that we 
have a workforce that is highly skilled, highly trained, and 
can--and, you know, all the jobs that we are creating with our 
projects--you know, 11,000 direct jobs at Micron, 80,000 direct 
and indirect jobs--those all should be high-paying jobs which 
will allow people to have a high standard of living. And we 
think that is an important element to ensure our technology 
leadership as well as our manufacturing efficiency.
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. Thank you.
    Mr. Wang, in your testimony you recommended that the 
Federal Government put policies in place to let the AI 
workforce thrive in America. Would you agree that we are 
holding back our future workforce by allowing children to grow 
up in an America without access to high-speed broadband 
Internet?
    Mr. Wang. I certainly think that the ability for our 
future--for our children and future workforce to embrace AI 
technologies and other technology is going to be absolutely 
critical to, you know, the future development of our country. 
So ultimately, yes, I think we need to ensure that----
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. Thank you. I have got 4 seconds.
    Real quickly, Mr. Turk, our American grid is now facing an 
unprecedented surge in electrical--electricity demand. How has 
the Trump administration's blanket refusal to permit large-
scale offshore wind projects impacted our country's ability to 
meet this new demand?
    Mr. Turk. So it is another tool in the tool belt. Why take 
it off? It is incredibly important, along with other sources of 
power.
    And I think your point more broadly about infrastructure 
funding, you need predictability and you need certainty. You 
don't need chaos. And that is what----
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. We are seeing.
    Mr. Carter of Louisiana. My time has ended.
    I yield back. Thank you.
    Mr. Evans. The gentleman yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentlelady from North Dakota, Mrs. Fedorchak.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for 
being here. It has been an interesting hearing.
    Dr. Schmidt, you said you think the AI--the importance of 
AI and the challenges we face has been underhyped. I agree with 
you. I also think that the challenges that our electric grid in 
this country face have also been underhyped. The truth of the 
matter is we are underpowered today, and that doesn't even take 
into consideration the demands that the AI industry brings, or 
the need and the urgency for us to meet that demand.
    So knowing that, would you all agree that one of the first 
things we should be doing is stopping retiring of existing 
resources that are connected to the grid?
    And I will just go down the line. Mr. Turk? Real quickly. I 
don't need a 1-minute answer. Yes or no, we should stop 
retiring existing resources if they are still somewhat 
economic.
    Mr. Turk. Yes, but we do need to keep an eye on other 
goals, including climate, and we need to make sure we----
    Mrs. Fedorchak. OK, thank you.
    Dr. Schmidt?
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. OK. Mr. Wang?
    Mr. Wang. Yes.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Mr.----
    Mr. Bhatia. All of the above.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Excellent, thank you. I think it is not a 
yes/but, it is yes, we need to stop retiring. This is an urgent 
need. Everyone has said it is a national security issue.
    All resources take time to get on the grid. And so when we 
don't even have enough to meet demand today, then we most 
certainly--and we have growing demand, we most certainly should 
all be able to agree in a bipartisan manner that we should keep 
whatever we can right now, and then go from there, because 
technologies evolve and they will continue to evolve.
    Mr. Turk, you had said earlier that you think that you had 
said that solar and wind are the cheapest resources to bring on 
to the grid. Can you elaborate? What do you include in that 
calculation?
    Mr. Turk. Yes. So I look not only at the levelized cost, 
but I look at what is actually being brought into our grid 
right now, driven by economics.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Does that include----
    Mr. Turk. And so 93 percent--our independent Energy 
Information Administration is saying 93 percent of the new 
power brought on this year will be solar and storage and wind.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. OK, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is 
coming on because it is the cheapest. Does your calculation 
include the cost of transmission to bring that online?
    Mr. Turk. Well, this is why we need to have--and I know you 
are an expert in this, and thank you for your leadership in 
NARUC, in particular, with your previous job--we need to have 
the whole grid. We need to be thinking about reconductoring. We 
need to be thinking about grid-enhancing technologies. We need 
to be thinking about transmission too. We need to think about 
it holistically----
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Right.
    Mr. Turk [continuing]. And systemically.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Exactly. And I support GETs 100 percent. It 
is not the 100 percent solution, though. And it is not----
    Mr. Turk. It is not, that is right.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. It should not be overstated, because I 
think a lot of people who don't understand this hear things 
like that and think there are simple solutions, when really 
they are far more complicated.
    And the truth of the matter is, when you consider solar and 
wind as being the cheapest, the cost of the transmission is not 
included in that calculation, nor is the cost of all the backup 
generation that is needed to provide power when solar and wind 
aren't available. Those have to be included in our calculations 
when we are talking about costs, because the people who pay for 
that, they notice that those aren't the cheapest things because 
it is all included in their bill. Nobody else soaks up those 
costs but the final customers who pay the bill.
    I would like to ask one more question of all of you. So I 
think that in an urgent time like this, it is more important 
than ever that the signals that this Federal Government sends 
through its policies provide clear messages and clear 
instruction about what we need the most.
    We had all the grid operators here a week ago. To the 
person, they all said what they need now is dispatchable power. 
Knowing that, is it reasonable for the Federal Government to 
continue to incentivize resources that are not dispatchable?
    And I will start down here at the end. Should we be sending 
that signal? If what we need is dispatchable, why are we 
sending strong signals that you should bring on things that 
aren't dispatchable through tax policy?
    Mr. Bhatia. I think that, you know, I mentioned all of the 
above earlier. I think that we need to think about technologies 
that can--and investing in technologies that will be able to 
contribute longer term. We shouldn't take away from that.
    I mentioned in my prepared remarks, you know, some nuclear 
technology that we have stopped investing in that, you know, 
probably looks today to be short-sighted. But at the same time, 
we need to be focusing on the technologies--on the sources of 
energy that can support the demand today.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Thank you.
    Mr. Wang?
    Mr. Wang. I am not an energy expert, I am an AI expert, so 
I am probably not the best to answer to this.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. OK, Dr. Schmidt?
    Dr. Schmidt. If you take all of the subsidies away of oil 
and gas and all the ones around renewables, you get a different 
calculation. Given we have the oil and gas subsidies, it is--I 
think it is fine to have the renewable subsidies.
    Mr. Guthrie [presiding]. Yes, our----
    Dr. Schmidt. The key thing is solve the storage problem, 
which I think has largely been solved. That creates 
dispatchability.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thanks.
    Mrs. Fedorchak. Thank you, I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair 
recognizes the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Menendez, for 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Menendez. Thank you, Chairman Guthrie, for holding this 
hearing this morning--afternoon, I guess, now.
    Dr. Schmidt, in your testimony you state that securing 
America's energy future requires bold, strategic Federal action 
and investment. One example highlighted by both you and Mr. 
Turk is the potential for fusion energy, which is generally 
supported by both Democrats and Republicans.
    Dr. Schmidt, can you briefly describe the potential fusion 
has for the future of our domestic energy production?
    Dr. Schmidt. Fusion is different from fission. It is a very 
different process. It is the technology that is inside our sun.
    There are two main approaches. One is essentially--it is 
called a tokamak. You essentially create a plasma that floats. 
The plasma is so hot you have to control it using magnets and 
AI to hold it, otherwise the walls would melt. There are a 
number of companies in America that are using that approach.
    There is an alternative approach, which is a pulsed fusion. 
This was funded initially through something called NIF in 
Livermore way back when. And it looks like the pulse--and what 
you do is you create a magnetic field which causes a collapse 
that causes electricity, and the electricity generated is 
greater than the electricity to cause the pulse. It is called Q 
> 1. The timeline of these things is demonstration for a number 
of these companies by roughly 2030.
    If you make some assumptions about the number of 
electricians and the scale of the problem--and the devices are 
typically 400 megawatts. So think of the number of 400-megawatt 
sort of power sources, and you sort of take the current power 
source--coal power, nuclear, basically, natural gas, whatever--
and you put this fusion thing in it, that is the model.
    The problem is, when I look at the timeframe, you are not 
until 2040 to 2045 when you have abundant fusion.
    Mr. Menendez. Right, to get onto the grid and make it part 
of our daily life.
    Dr. Schmidt. Now, having said that, this is an area where 
America will lead. It should be a source of great pride for 
America to lead in this for the world.
    Mr. Menendez. I agree with you. And how important is 
Federal funding specifically for the U.S. National Laboratories 
program to advancing new technologies like fision?
    Dr. Schmidt. The DOE work in this is fundamental, and such 
is true of the labs and all of the stuff I am talking about. 
The people that I have hired in my company are all coming out 
of the labs, thank God.
    Mr. Menendez. And thank you for that. And so just yes or 
no: If this program were to see its funding cut or 
significantly reduced, would that hinder our ability to harness 
this new technology?
    Dr. Schmidt. It would be horrific. We need much more 
funding in these areas.
    Mr. Menendez. See, I agree with you, but last month at a 
Space, Science, and Technology Committee hearing, leaders from 
the Department of Energy sounded the alarms about tens of 
millions of dollars that are crucial to research development 
being put on hold because of President Trump's funding freezes 
across the Federal Government.
    Dr. Schmidt, in your testimony you mentioned the need to 
dramatically increase funding for energy sector cybersecurity.
    Dr. Schmidt, again, just yes or no: Should the Federal 
Government take the lead on having a strategy to combat cyber 
attacks to our critical infrastructure?
    Dr. Schmidt. It has to.
    Mr. Menendez. Yes, I agree, but President Trump recently 
signed an Executive order that puts States and municipalities 
at the forefront of our Nation's cyber attack response process, 
instead of the Federal Government, weakening Federal investment 
in disaster preparedness and creating a patchwork plan for 
attacks to our critical infrastructure across the country.
    Dr. Schmidt, yes or no, does that seem like a wise 
strategy?
    Dr. Schmidt. It is not a good idea. Remember that we have 
an incredible cyber force in America under the Pentagon and the 
National Security Agency. I do a lot of military work. They are 
phenomenal.
    Mr. Menendez. I agree with you, and their work should be 
celebrated, and it should sit at the Federal Government, not 
States and municipalities. I am in complete agreement with you.
    Mr. Wang, in your testimony you called for the 
establishment of a national AI data reserve. Your testimony 
also notes that the right regulatory framework maximizes 
innovation while still creating proper guardrails.
    Mr. Wang, yes or no: Should guardrails be placed on the 
government's collection of sensitive data?
    Mr. Wang. Yes.
    Mr. Menendez. Yes, I agree. But here is the thing, right? 
So the Trump administration is currently weaponizing data that 
they have within their control--including families' sensitive 
personal information that is collected by HUD and IRS--to 
target immigrants, mixed-status families, right?
    So I agree that having the data is the power, right, that 
we will be able to use in terms of AI, right? And the Federal 
Government having a reserve or a collection of data is how we 
fully harness AI, right? But this administration is undermining 
our belief and trust in the Federal Government's ability to 
properly hold data and not use it and weaponize it, which this 
administration is.
    This is my challenge with Republicans right now, is that 
they are seeing all this stuff happen in real time, right?
    Dr. Schmidt, you have talked about an all-of-the-above 
approach to energy production, but they want to roll back 
investments in renewable energy. And they sit here every week 
and make it seem like it is business as usual. You are their 
witnesses, and you are telling them we need to reverse course 
in what this administration is doing, and they remain silent 
week after week.
    Mr. Guthrie. I am sorry, the----
    Mr. Menendez. And that is the challenge.
    And by the way, people have gone over on the other side.
    Mr. Guthrie. The time has expired.
    Mr. Menendez. I am 3 seconds over, Mr. Carter. Three 
seconds, OK?
    But this is something you all need to be accountable to the 
American people----
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman's time has expired.
    Mr. Menendez. It is like this administration----
    Mr. Guthrie. And the gentleman from Georgia is recognized.
    Mr. Menendez. Thank you, Chairman Guthrie.
    Mr. Guthrie. Yes, thanks.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you 
all for being here. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding 
this very important meeting.
    Artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of our 
economy and our society, as we well know. From energy and 
communications to national security and healthcare, AI is 
both--presents extraordinary opportunities.
    I am very interested in healthcare, and chair of the Health 
Subcommittee, so I want to give you an example: HealthFlow. 
HealthFlow is a company that is applying artificial 
intelligence to transform the diagnosis and treatment of 
coronary artery disease, which kills one in five Americans. 
This is significant.
    Using a standard CT scan of the heart, HealthFlow's 
algorithms can determine blood pressure and flow in the 
coronary arteries, allowing physicians to determine the 
severity of disease and whether invasive treatment is needed. 
In fact, HealthFlow's technology has proven to decrease the 
rate of heart attacks and save the Medicare program more than 
$3,100 per patient. Per patient.
    Our job as lawmakers is to make sure the U.S. continues to 
lead in AI innovation while protecting American values like 
data privacy, reliable infrastructure, and fair competition.
    Mr. Schmidt--Dr. Schmidt, I want to ask you. Startups play 
a crucial role. We all know that they play a crucial role in 
driving innovation in the technology ecosystem.
    How can we avoid creating regulatory structures that only 
large companies with extensive legal teams and lobbying power 
can navigate?
    Dr. Schmidt. I agree with the premise of your question, 
sir. The innovation that is occurring in startups is 
phenomenal. You see completely new techniques using AI. A 
typical example would be cancer scoring, right, where you have 
a bunch of things. I am part of the Mayo Clinic board and so 
forth, and they have--they are spinning out startups to do 
precisely this, so it can be done. We need to have the entire 
ecosystem of venture capital and so forth behind the image that 
you described.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. Exactly, and not just where the 
bigger companies are the ones who are doing this----
    Dr. Schmidt. Right, and may I add that some of that is 
actually the data problem that Mr. Wang keeps talking about.
    Many of the startups cannot get the data that they need for 
various regulatory reasons. A simple example would be that if 
you had opt out of privacy things for healthcare that people 
could--for research, that you could have research pools, then 
you could accelerate that. There's a whole bunch of approaches 
there that are reasonable tradeoffs.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. OK, let's talk about the role that 
AI is going to play in developing new treatments and cures. And 
we know that is going to be the case. How should lawmakers be 
thinking about integrating AI tools into HHS and CMS and FDA to 
create a more efficient process like quicker drug approvals?
    Dr. Schmidt. One of the--well, the biggest problem with 
drugs is the phase 3 trial cost and the timing.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. Exactly.
    Dr. Schmidt. I am involved with a startup that has a new 
approach using AI to simplify that. We will see if my startup 
is successful or not.
    The current model is static and unchanging. It is not 
informed by data. A simple regulatory change to allow better 
analytics around how you prove that the thing is phase 3 trial 
would really--would deliver a drug in--years ahead of time, and 
years is lives ahead of time.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. And we all understand this is--this 
could be a great benefit. I mean, this could be a game changer 
with diagnosing, with making sure that we are doing the right 
treatments. AI in healthcare is going to be phenomenal. I am 
very optimistic about that. But it is also going to have some 
downfalls and some things that are dangerous that we need to 
really guard against.
    But we have heard a lot of promise about how it can cut 
costs and how it can increase efficiency within the Federal 
Government, especially in some of the organizations like HHS.
    How should regulators think about contracting with 
innovators to integrate AI into the regulatory and oversight 
functions that we have, particularly in Congress?
    Dr. Schmidt. I will give you a personal answer.
    The Federal Government does a terrible job of procuring 
software. The Federal Government does quite a good job of 
building--buying hardware. Software is not managed the same way 
that you manage hardware. Software is never done. It requires 
constant attention, the teams are constantly turning over.
    Instead, the Federal Government purchases specific 
contracts for specific outcomes with specific teams. It doesn't 
work in software. In order to achieve your vision, you have to 
attack the software problem. The reason our Government is so 
incredibly inefficient, in my view, is because it doesn't use 
software correctly.
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. It doesn't use software correctly. 
Have you got an example of that?
    Dr. Schmidt. Everywhere you look. I mean, if you look at 
what the tech companies do in terms of integrated software, 
there is no analog. Every aspect of data in the Federal 
Government is insecure. All of them are being attacked by the 
Chinese and others. The systems----
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank----
    Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. Are so bad that people have to 
add layers on top to fix them.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank----
    Dr. Schmidt. Many of the underlying databases are COBOL----
    Mr. Carter of Georgia. My time is up. Thank you, and I 
yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. So Mr.--so Dr. Schmidt, I know you had a hard 
stop. Can we do one more?
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes, of course.
    Mr. Guthrie. And we will--we have just a handful left, but 
whenever you are--let me know when you need to be excused.
    Dr. Schmidt. No, no, I appreciate that. These are very 
important----
    Mr. Guthrie. But I want to make sure that everybody gets a 
chance to ask questions.
    So Dr.--Mr. Mullin, you are now recognized from California. 
Mr. Mullin, you are recognized.
    Mr. Mullin. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to all of our 
witnesses for your testimony.
    We have heard from our panel today that, to compete on AI, 
we are going to need a lot more stuff: more energy, more 
materials, more investment, more of everything. But steel, 
aluminum, and everything else that goes into powering data 
centers cost money. And we cannot win the global race on AI if 
American businesses can't afford the raw materials to build 
that infrastructure.
    Amid this uncertainty, the majority is considering a repeal 
of the IRA and the Infrastructure Law, two landmark laws that 
have already leveraged hundreds of billions of dollars of 
private-sector investment in our country's energy 
infrastructure. There are also reports coming out that the DOE 
is planning to unilaterally cancel billions of dollars in 
grants for hydrogen hubs and long-duration energy storage 
projects that have already received congressionally approved 
funding.
    Rolling back these laws and unlawfully cutting committed 
funding will severely undermine the trust in the Federal 
Government that stakeholders have, until now at least, taken 
for granted.
    So Mr. Turk, in your time as the Deputy Secretary at DOE, 
you interacted with stakeholders across the energy and AI 
sectors. What will be the worst impacts of all of this economic 
and policy uncertainty, including the tariffs which were 
referenced multiple times today, on the investments that are 
underpinning AI?
    Mr. Turk. So it is the grants, it is the loans, and it is 
the tax incentives, and getting rid of or even just causing 
confusion about whether the grants are actually coming.
    And I should say on the grants this was money that you all 
have already given, and this is money already obligated in some 
instances. And so the private sector needs to rely on the 
Government doing what it is supposed to do, doing it 
professionally, doing it without any political interference.
    So I think what it does is it not only puts those immediate 
projects at risk, but it puts the credibility of the Government 
at risk, as well. And if we are going to be successful 
competing on AI, building out our infrastructure, doing all the 
other things that we need to do, we need to have credibility in 
the Government working in partnership with the private sector.
    Mr. Mullin. So thank you for that, and I fear there will be 
serious repercussions for our energy system if cuts are made to 
the IRA programs that are essential for energy as energy demand 
increases as part of AI.
    But as important as the AI race is, we also have to talk 
about rising costs. People are paying more not only at the 
grocery store, but losing money in their retirement savings. 
But recent estimates show these tariffs are going to cost 
everyday Americans an additional $3,800 a year on their utility 
bills. To meet both the AI challenge and cost challenge, it is 
clear that we need more energy resources, and we need to get 
them online as soon as possible.
    Earlier today you mentioned that renewables are the 
cheapest, quickest sources to deploy when it comes to energy. 
So what--Mr. Turk, what does Congress need to do to unlock this 
development and ensure that consumers are not hit with the 
higher costs yet again by the Trump administration?
    Mr. Turk. So the good news is you all have done your jobs. 
Now, we could use more, but you have got the tax incentives, 
the grants, the loans in place. What is at risk here is, if 
those are repealed, just two provisions--the investment and 
production tax credit, technology-neutral tax credit--if that 
is repealed, Americans' households are paying, on average, $220 
more per year just with those two provisions repealed, let 
alone the other provisions and grants and loans not going out 
in the way they are.
    So this is--the worst way to keep downward pressure on 
prices is to repeal these incredibly important tax incentives.
    Mr. Mullin. Great. Thank you for that, sir. And thank you 
all.
    With that I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentleman yields back. The 
Chair recognizes Mr. Griffith--oh, I am sorry, Mr. Fry. I 
apologize.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    South Carolina is experiencing a remarkable spat of 
economic growth. From the Grand Strand of the Pee Dee, new 
businesses are opening, manufacturers are investing, and 
families are moving in. That growth is a tremendous 
opportunity, but it does pose some significant challenges.
    Yesterday, President Trump issued Executive orders 
declaring a national energy emergency and directing swift 
action to boost grid reliability and cut red tape for energy 
projects. These steps are both timely and necessary. Power 
demand is rising sharply. There's a lot of contributing factors 
to that, but it is. And in South Carolina, nuclear power 
provides more than half of our electricity, giving us a pretty 
strong foundation.
    But permitting delays, premature plant retirements, and 
transmission bottlenecks threaten not only our State, but all 
50 States. We need a Federal policy that keeps pace with 
innovation. That means faster permitting, support for fuel-
secure generation, and a strong, reliable grid. I appreciate 
the testimony of all the witnesses today.
    My initial questions, Mr. Bhatia, I appreciate your 
comments on the need to reshore semiconductor chip 
manufacturing and secure our supply chains in this country. As 
you noted, China controls an overwhelming majority of global 
capacity for critical material refining and processing, an 
unacceptable strategic vulnerability on our part. During our 
hearing with the regional grid operators, we heard that regions 
like New England, as an example, are facing real constraints on 
natural gas capacity. That bottleneck is holding back the type 
of energy-intensive investments that we need to support AI and 
manufacturing.
    So if we are going to plan for the future, where we reshore 
significant portions of our supply chain, how important do you 
believe permitting reform is to infrastructure like natural gas 
pipelines and the like?
    Mr. Bhatia. I think it is critical. And I think the cost of 
inaction that we have had over the last several years and 
continue to have is very, very high.
    I mean, you have heard multiple data points in testimony 
around the sharp spike in demand that is forecasted both 
because of the data centers that are going to be built, as well 
as the manufacturing in semiconductors, as well as other 
industry segments. And so, you know, after having, you know, 
many, many years where supply and demand has been matched and 
stable, this spike threatens to create a dislocation that could 
ultimately threaten the viability of some of these projects 
longer term, whether those are in the data center segment or in 
manufacturing.
    And I think streamlining and working to be able to remove, 
you know, duplicative processes between Federal and State is 
something that both parties can get behind. And States--red, 
blue--red States and blue States both can get behind trying to 
ensure that there is a streamlined process for critical 
projects to move forward.
    Mr. Fry. Sir, do you think that we can realistically meet 
our energy demands without those simple reforms that you talked 
about?
    Mr. Bhatia. You know, I am not sure. I believe that we--I 
don't think we should try and figure that out. I think we 
should make sure we move forward with the permitting, and I 
think the permitting needs to be across transmission, it needs 
to be across generation, and it needs to be across all of the 
above sources of energy investments that we need to make.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you.
    Dr. Schmidt, I appreciate you staying a little bit. Your 
testimony laid out the strategic importance of AI and the race 
with China in pretty stark terms. You mentioned that AI data 
centers could require up to 10 gigawatts of power each, and 
that we risk falling behind.
    Given what we are seeing across the country, though, 
especially in States with business-friendly environments, can 
you speak to the importance of permitting reform and how it 
relates to our competitiveness in the AI space?
    Dr. Schmidt. When you look at people who have the money, 
they still can't get the permits and, in particular, the 
interconnection permits that are needed to get into the grid. 
You can solve that problem by, for example, building your own 
power plant next to your own data center. But that is not 
particularly efficient.
    There are all sorts of other issues. If you look at the 
cost of, for example, building--I will give you an example. 
TSMC built a semiconductor plant in Arizona, and by the time 
they were done it cost four times more than in Taiwan. Some of 
that is labor, some of that is permitting, some of it is 
government. We are not competitive globally against our key 
partners and competitors with respect to costs and timing.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you for that. And you also mentioned the 
potential for AI to help manage and secure our grid. What role 
do you see for the Federal Government in AI-enabled grid 
modernization, particularly for regions like mine in the 
southeast that are growing so rapidly?
    Dr. Schmidt. So way back when, before all this was well 
known, Google did an initiative where we looked at our data 
centers--which had been designed by the very best scientists, 
according to us, you know, in our own arrogant way--and we 
applied our own AI. And it beat our own top people by 15 
percent. That 15 percent of efficiency went straight to the 
bottom line. It showed me that you can take any system and, 
using AI, do more what is called predictive analytics, and you 
can predict loads and basically shed loads and handle it much 
more efficiently. That is where our grid needs to be.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, I have many more questions, but I got 15 
seconds. So with that----
    Mr. Guthrie. Will----
    Mr. Fry [continuing]. I will yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie [continuing]. You yield to me?
    Mr. Fry. Yes.
    Mr. Guthrie. My purpose--for Mr. Menendez--for asking Dr. 
Schmidt to be here is not to come as a Republican witness and 
not tell us what we want to hear, but tell us what we need to 
hear. And I think we have all heard some things that probably 
don't fit within our ideology, but things we needed to hear and 
we can figure out and work through.
    So time has expired. I yield back, and I will recognize--I 
am sorry, I apologize to Mrs. Fletcher for missing her last 
time. But Mrs. Fletcher, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
    Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you so much, Chairman Guthrie. I 
appreciate it. And I appreciate all of our witnesses for being 
here today and for your testimony.
    I think this has been a really useful and important 
hearing. You have given us lots to think about, and we have 
heard from all of you, right, that the United States is really 
on the brink of an AI revolution, that there are many things we 
need to be thinking about, and just kind of the 
transformational change that this is going to bring, including 
demand for energy.
    And in normal times that should be great news for my home 
state of Texas, where we already have a growing industry, a 
cluster of data centers, and we have the energy resources and 
the know-how to meet this sort of record high demand. But 
President Trump's policies are eroding the certainty and 
predictability that the people who run businesses and make 
investments need to succeed at every turn. And this is 
particularly true when it comes to building our infrastructure 
for our energy to meet tomorrow's demand. So I want to focus a 
little bit on that.
    But Mr. Schmidt, I really appreciated your opening 
testimony today before the panel, and I wrote down a few things 
that you were speaking about that I want to follow on. And you 
mentioned--you referenced sort of the balance of power 
globally, and I think we can all acknowledge that we are in a 
very uncertain and shifting moment in our history. It is 
changing minute by minute.
    And--but you said something I thought that was really 
important, kind of--that I want to ask you about that in the 
context of something you said in your written testimony, which 
really struck me. And I am just going to quote from your 
testimony, but you said, ``The Government can't win this 
technological race alone. We must reignite America's unique 
innovation power, the potent collaboration between government, 
private industry, and academia''--and I won't read the whole 
quote in the interest of time.
    But before I served on this committee, I served on the 
Science, Space, and Technology Committee, and I was struck at 
every single hearing by the witnesses. We always had a witness 
from academia, from the Government, and from industry talking 
about how well and efficiently and effectively they 
collaborated.
    And so I assume that you would agree with me that the 
disruptions that we are seeing are challenging in this moment. 
I assume you would agree with me that regulatory certainty is 
an important factor for private industry and attracting capital 
and to projects.
    That is yes?
    And I assume you would agree that the supply chain 
disruptions and other kinds of things that we are experiencing 
are going to hurt productivity.
    Dr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mrs. Fletcher. I also assume that you are aware, based 
especially on your testimony about your involvement with the 
Mayo Clinic, that you are aware of the cuts to academic 
research that are happening. Whether it is through the NIH and 
the cost sharing for medical research or grant funding at 
various institutions, I keep hearing from my constituents in 
every industry that the increased uncertainty that we are 
experiencing as a result of this administration's policies--
these are all new changes this year--is really an impediment.
    And so I just want you to elaborate with the time we have 
left, which is about 2 minutes, on your vision for revitalizing 
the partnership that you described between industry and 
academia and the Government, and then share your thoughts on 
how we can and should do that in this environment, and what 
kinds of changes we should make to make that possible.
    And I know we don't have everybody in the room today, but I 
have heard our colleagues on both sides of the aisle are 
listening, and I think your insights here would be really 
important.
    Dr. Schmidt. Thank you. The--Vannevar Bush post-World War 
II constructed the sort of structure that you are describing. 
The Government is a regulator and a proposed--and a proponent, 
and also does basic research funding. Universities do that 
research, and then venture capital takes huge risks to do this.
    You see this in traditional Democratic areas, but also 
Republican areas. For example, fracking was an American 
invention following the same problem, and it produced enormous 
benefits to America by virtue of economics and so forth. 
Everybody is aware of that. We are now essentially energy 
independent.
    So the role of innovation is core. I call this innovation 
power. I have written about this at some level. The future of 
America will be determined about the rate at which we can 
innovate. And we have, unfortunately, somebody who is trying to 
copy us and moves very quickly. Their innovation model is more 
centralized, but they are plenty smart, they got lots of 
resources, and they are very focused, and they do all the right 
things with respect to--of course, it is not a democracy--
getting the right smart people in the right place. They produce 
national champions, as Alex mentioned, and they push them and 
they push them hard for globalization.
    China is now, in fact, overbuilding manufacturing so that 
they can essentially become the world's manufacturer, again, 
with huge impacts economically to everybody. You see the power 
of innovation right in front of you there in China. Why are we 
not going after that in AI? We should. We invented it. It is 
right in front of us. It is the core of everything we can do, 
new developments in physics and biology and science and so 
forth.
    The current administration's cuts--the 15 percent indirect 
cost recovery, the NIH costs--are not consistent with that 
vision. If they have a problem with specific programs, do it 
specifically, not generally.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thanks.
    Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you so much. I have gone over my time. 
I really appreciate it.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you, I appreciate----
    Mrs. Fletcher. And Chairman Guthrie, I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. I appreciate it very much. The gentlelady 
yields back.
    Mr. Evans, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Evans. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member, and, 
of course, to the witnesses for taking the time to testify 
today.
    Dr. Schmidt, my first question will be to you. In your 
testimony, you talk a lot about China's investment in a lot of 
different forms of energy like wind, solar, and newer 
technologies like fusion. The United States has made similar 
investments in the past several years, but I think it is also 
important to highlight that not all energy is necessarily 
created equal.
    And so the first question to you is, in your opinion, which 
nation has brought more dispatchable baseload energy generation 
online over the last 5 years between China and the U.S.?
    Dr. Schmidt. It is almost certainly China.
    Mr. Evans. And then, in your opinion, which nation has 
taken the most dispatchable baseload energy offline in the last 
5 years?
    Dr. Schmidt. Almost certainly the United States.
    Mr. Evans. Thank you, and I agree with your answers there. 
Obviously----
    Dr. Schmidt. I should include Germany for shutting down all 
of its nuclear plants, which was also a mistake.
    Mr. Evans. Thank you. But yes, I agree with your answers 
there.
    We know that China's thermal power generation has reached a 
record high just last year, and that is driven by things like 
coal-fired plants, which have also reached a record high as a 
percentage of what it is generating in China.
    And by comparison, the United States is on track to retire 
12.3 gigawatts of dispatchable power this year. And for me 
personally, that is concerning because over 10 percent of 
that--about 1.3 percent of that is retirements of dispatchable 
baseload power that is taking place in Colorado, even though we 
are only 1.3 percent of total energy production in the United 
States.
    So with that focus on Colorado, the next question to you 
is, we are taking over a gigawatt of power--or scheduled to 
take a gigawatt of baseload power offline in Colorado this 
year, 5 gigawatts of dispatchable baseload power offline by 
2030, at the same time that my Governor is saying he wants to 
make our State a--or, excuse me, a hub for quantum technology 
and AI.
    So the question to you is, if you wanted to be your State--
make your State a leader in quantum computing AI, what would be 
the energy policy that you would want to see to support that?
    Dr. Schmidt. It probably makes sense to retire the coal 
plants and replace them by natural gas plants. It makes sense 
in Colorado because you have such great natural resources to 
work on enhanced geothermal. So there are things that you can 
do.
    But the core message, I think, from the entire panel here 
is we want more of everything, right, and that we want it 
sooner. And not only do we want it, we need it for American 
exceptionalism.
    Mr. Evans. Thank you, and I appreciate your reference to 
the gas plants, because my district is truly an all-of-the-
above energy district: 83 percent of the oil, 56 percent of the 
natural gas in Colorado, largest wind generating, you know, the 
wind turbine manufacturing facility probably in the United 
States is headquartered in my district. Geothermal, solar, we 
truly are an all-of-the-above.
    But specifically with gas plants, one of the things that I 
have heard there is that there is a major backlog in getting 
the gas turbines. So can you speak a little bit more to the 
timing of retiring coal generation if you don't have a gas 
alternate immediately ready to go?
    Dr. Schmidt. I am not enough of an expert to give you a 
precise answer. The reason that natural gas plants have become 
more expensive is demand, which is--and is sort of what we 
want, right? We want more of everything, and then the market 
will react.
    The problem is that these things take years to--backlogs 
get--years. That delay in natural gas plants will hurt AI 
competitiveness because it is the best source of power in 
certain situations.
    My personal advice is start by--since China is allegedly 
dumping solar panels, just buy them, right, because they lower 
energy costs, right? Do whatever it takes to get more power 
into America--as Mr. Turk says, more electrons.
    Mr. Evans. Thank you for that.
    Mr. Wang, kind of pivoting off of that conversation, I am 
just curious if you can speak to--in my remaining 45 seconds--
just briefly, what happens if we lose this AI race with China?
    What does the world look like if China becomes the leader 
in that space and no longer the United States in part because 
we retired too much power?
    Mr. Wang. I spoke to this, and I think Dr. Schmidt made 
some relevant comments that, you know, AI is on the brink of 
becoming a very, very powerful technology that is much more 
than just ChatGPT. It is a reasoning engine. It has the ability 
to, you know, very soon conduct cyber attacks, you know, be 
really a very important technology for national security.
    So to sum it up, I guess, in 10 seconds, you know, in a 
world where the Chinese Communist Party wins, they have clear 
intention to utilize AI as a mechanism to export their ideology 
globally, as well as potentially, you know, enable them and 
other authoritarian countries to lead.
    Mr. Guthrie. His time has expired on this. So thank you, 
Mr. Evans. He yields back. We are trying to keep--we have three 
more to go, Mr.--Dr. Schmidt.
    So Mr. Landsman.
    Mr. Landsman. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of 
our panelists for your testimony today. This has been 
incredibly helpful. And, you know, the issue of AI is one that, 
you know, we have to get right. There is no debate about that. 
Winning on AI and harnessing it for good requires, as you all 
have said very, I think, impactfully, clear instructions and 
guidance and meaningful investments.
    Mr. Turk, let me start with you. Congress has struggled to 
do this, and I am not picking a fight here, I am not leading 
you in any direction. I am genuinely curious.
    What do you think the barriers are, in terms of us laying 
out that clear guidance and making the necessary investments?
    Mr. Turk. So the good news is Congress provided that 
certainty, provided that window of investment. That is one of 
the brilliant parts of the legislation that you all passed on 
the tax credit side to have tax credits in place for 10 years 
that investors, that developers, that utilities, that AI 
companies can rely upon and know will be there so that they can 
make investment decisions that will come to fruition over a 
period of years.
    So the good news is the biggest thing you have to do at 
this point is leave those tax incentives, let that grant money 
do what the grant money was intended to do by Congress, but 
just execute on that.
    Mr. Landsman. That is on the investment and--so thank you 
for that--on the investment and--piece of this. But on the 
clear instructions and guidance, I mean, what do you think is 
holding us back from providing that framework that everyone has 
been asking for?
    Mr. Turk. Well, this is where the private sector will do 
what the private sector does best. When it has that certainty, 
it doesn't have the chaos from tariffs, it doesn't have the 
chaos from repeal of provisions.
    I also completely agree with all the panelists. I don't 
think there is disagreement. We need to build, and we need to 
build quicker in this country, including transmission, but a 
whole range of clean energy resources. Permitting takes too 
long in our country. It is complicated. We have made some 
progress on that, but we need to make more progress.
    Mr. Landsman. I totally agree.
    Mr. Turk. To make it durable it needs to be bipartisan. And 
so I know there is conversations happening. We just need to get 
on with it.
    Mr. Landsman. Mr. Schmidt--thank you, I agree with that.
    Mr. Schmidt, I--can you just talk a little bit about how 
important talent is? You discussed it earlier, but how 
important talent is to this whole process and the impact of the 
chaos around the administration's immigration policies.
    Dr. Schmidt. So Silicon Valley and the world I represent is 
powered by the smartest people, or at least the self-proclaimed 
smartest people in the world. And we collectively need them 
because the algorithms and the approaches we take are 
incomputable by normal people. I don't understand what most of 
these people are doing, and I have a Ph.D. in this area.
    Mr. Landsman. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. That is how complicated this stuff is. The new 
AI stuff is largely math, and it is a new set of math. In fact, 
there are people who are working on what are the limits of AI 
using--again, trying to find out where the--really, limits are. 
All of that knowledge is in the heads of people around the 
world who are highly specialized. They are not normal people. 
They are just geniuses in one way or the other, men and women. 
I want all of them here. It is insane to not let them in here.
    If you look at polymaths--I wrote a book on this called 
``Genesis,'' and we studied polymaths. A single polymath, the 
person who invents something--this is the Leonardo da Vinci-
type person--can generate a $1 trillion industry. Carver, Mead, 
and so forth in the 1970s invented semiconductors, now a 
multitrillion-dollar industry. We need those people in America. 
Imagine if each and every one of those people did not live in 
America, they lived in another country, and in particular 
China.
    Furthermore, we have lots of evidence, for example, that 
the quantum lead that China now has occurred because a specific 
quantum physicist was not allowed to stay in the country, and 
he said, ``OK, I will go back and work for China,'' and the 
rest is history. And quantum is a huge national security issue 
for America right now.
    Mr. Landsman. Thank you for that. Also, Dr. Schmidt, I just 
wanted to talk a little bit about the prices. I only have a few 
seconds, but prices have gone up, electricity prices in Ohio, 
and obviously this is going to cause even more pressure on 
prices. Is it the tax credits? And is that the most important 
thing we can do to keep prices down, or do you want Congress to 
do more?
    Dr. Schmidt. I want more supply.
    Mr. Landsman. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. More supply should lead to better and tougher 
competition and more--a more dynamic network, which would allow 
vendor choice.
    The way--the Congress should not set prices. The Congress 
should enable competition at every level in the value chain in 
every industry, and in particular in electricity.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thanks. We have two more. Two more. If 
somebody else comes in after, we are going to excuse you, Dr. 
Schmidt, and we will keep going.
    But Mr. Griffith is--thanks for yielding back. Mr. Griffith 
is recognized for five.
    Mr. Griffith. Thank you very much. Let's continue talking 
about prices.
    So it makes absolutely no sense to retire a coal plant, 
let's say, that was opened up in 2012 or 2013 that has a life 
expectancy of more than 50 years because we have decided we 
hate coal. Isn't that right, Mr. Schmidt--Dr. Schmidt?
    Dr. Schmidt. It has to do with how long--it is a more 
complicated answer.
    Mr. Griffith. OK.
    Dr. Schmidt. It has----
    Mr. Griffith. So for the question--let me cut through some 
of the complications. For the question that Mr. Landsman asked, 
he said our prices are going up, what do we need to do, you 
said we need more supply. I agree with that.
    But also, we can't leave stranded assets out there, because 
this was opened up in my district in 2012 as the cleanest coal 
plant at the time in the world, and--a very clean plant, and it 
is underutilized right now, and there's movements afoot to have 
it close up early, and that takes power away from us, and that 
affects prices because the consumer not only can't access the 
power because there is not enough supply--which you just said--
but it also puts them in a situation where they are paying for 
the stranded asset of the existing coal plant and the new plant 
that might replace it with whatever fuel source it uses, 
whether it be nuclear, which I am also in favor of, or whether 
it be natural gas, or whether it be wind or solar.
    That is fairly straightforward, isn't it? Because if you 
leave the stranded asset, the ratepayer is paying for both the 
old and the new.
    Dr. Schmidt. I grew up in the coal country of Virginia, so 
I do understand.
    Mr. Griffith. Oh, what county?
    Dr. Schmidt. Blacksburg.
    Mr. Griffith. OK. Well, they did have coal mining there at 
one time, but, yes, I represent that area. That is my district.
    Dr. Schmidt. The important thing about coal is that over 
the long run coal is going to get regulated out, because it is 
such a--coal is much dirtier than natural gas.
    Mr. Griffith. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. You would always choose natural gas over coal 
if you made that decision today.
    Given that you have an underutilized coal plant, I would 
encourage you to look at the network interconnect. Why is it 
not fully used? Why are we not taking that resource that you 
described and fully using it right now?
    Mr. Griffith. Because we are overregulating coal. I will 
just answer that one for you.
    Now, I also have--and this gets to be interesting--I have 
an underutilized natural gas plant as well in the area, and so 
we are trying to attract investment into that region that you 
grew up in. Blacksburg is a wonderful town. I also represent 
the coal fields where they still produce the coal and natural 
gas as well, because of our coal bed methane. And we have got a 
natural gas facility that used to be a coal facility--it was 
converted--that is also underutilized.
    And we would love to see folks take a look because, as you 
know, having come from that region, these are very industrious 
people. And whether or not they have that diploma, I am 
reminded of the scene in ``The Wizard of Oz,'' that there is a 
lot of smarts out there, and I believe that both data centers 
and AI could benefit by being in the region.
    But when you close down these facilities--and I understand 
you have a preference for natural gas, and I understand that. 
But when you close down these facilities, that creates a 
problem, because wouldn't you agree we--right now, in the last 
year, the American Electric Reliability Corporation's long-term 
assessment estimated that 115 gigawatts of dispatchable 
generation is planned to retire over the next 10 years, in 
comparison to what they estimate to be an increased demand of 
150-plus gigawatts. Doesn't that impede or make it more 
difficult for us to have space to grow AI and power our AI as 
we need to?
    Dr. Schmidt. Again, I think all of us believe in more.
    Mr. Griffith. Yes.
    Dr. Schmidt. With respect to the specifics, you have 
regulatory issues which you pointed out, which I think should 
be loosened. But I also think the long term for coal is to be 
replaced by natural gas, and I think we should get organized 
around that. And eventually, natural gas will be replaced by 
fusion, which will ultimately solve all of our problems 15 
years from now.
    Mr. Griffith. Yes, I am looking forward to fusion getting 
here. I hope that you are right on your estimate.
    I would say this, as well, because so many times people 
hear statements like that in my district, and they 
automatically assume that that means coal production is going 
to end, and they don't realize that what you are talking about 
is coal production for the creation of electric generation. And 
my district has a rich seam, as you are probably aware, of 
metallurgical coal, which for those who don't know, means that 
we mined that coal to make coke and steel out of it so that we 
can produce the steel that is needed for this country. I think 
somebody mentioned it earlier today that we need the steel so 
we can make sure we build the equipment and so forth to do the 
AI with, the buildings, et cetera. And you are not going to 
make that really good steel without burning some of my 
metallurgical coal.
    I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Guthrie. The gentleman yields back, and the Chair 
recognizes Ms. McClellan----
    Ms. McClellan. Thank you, Chairman.
    Mr. Guthrie [continuing]. For 5 minutes.
    Ms. McClellan. Thank you, Chairman Guthrie and Member 
Pallone, for planning this hearing. This is probably my 
favorite hearing of my entire almost a little over 2-year 
congressional career. It is definitely the most important.
    And Dr. Schmidt, I am glad you stayed, because in your 
opening statement you said that the sheer speed of AI 
development is outpacing our societal and government ability to 
adapt, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. In fact, 7 years 
ago, in 2018, I attended a conference at which a speaker was 
talking about the rise of AI and megatrends and all of these 
things, and he basically said the same thing. And I came to the 
conclusion 7 years ago that none of our systems in the United 
States at all--government, education, none of them--are 
prepared for what is coming.
    But at the same time, as Mr. Wang testified, at that point 
7 years ago China already had an AI master plan, advanced 
capabilities, and President Xi Jinping declared China's plan to 
dominate AI by 2030. Yet this committee held its first hearing 
on AI in 2023. The race for AI dominance is reminiscent of the 
Space Race, but instead of the Soviet Union, now it is China.
    But the stakes are even higher. And we won the race to land 
a man on the moon, and that was critically important to our 
economy and our national security and innovation and scientific 
advancement. And to win the race for AI is just as important.
    But as Mr. Wang testified, while the U.S. leads on 
computing and we are tied with China on algorithmic 
development, China leads on data, which is the raw material 
that enables AI to learn, adapt, and improve over time and, as 
Mr. Wang said, is AI's oil, gas, wind, solar all wrapped in 
one. So if we lose the race to lead data, we lose the race for 
AI dominance.
    Now, the Trump administration's actions since January 20th 
have directly undermined our ability to win the race for AI 
dominance. The haphazard firing of Federal workers, freezing or 
cutting Federal funds for government agencies and universities 
critical to supporting competing AI hinders our ability to 
implement the recommendations of Mr. Wang's testimony and his 
four pillars to win.
    This war on renewables that the President has engaged in 
and attempts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits 
undermine the ability to meet our energy demands for data 
centers. And Trump's reckless tariff policy is increasing 
costs, exacerbating supply-and-demand issues already occurring, 
and raising the cost to build new data centers and 
semiconductor manufacturing plants that are critical for our AI 
success. Because while semiconductors have been exempted from 
the tariffs, the equipment and machinery used to build and run 
the data centers have not.
    This is not theoretical. Just this week, Microsoft 
announced that it is backing off plans to build three data 
centers in Ohio. So, given this committee's clear desire to 
position the U.S. to win the competition with China for AI 
dominance, I am perplexed by my colleagues on the other side of 
the aisle's silence over the Trump administration's actions 
that hinder our ability to do so, and the blank check it looks 
like we are about to give the President to take those actions.
    So Mr. Wang, you offer two options for AI dominance in the 
future, and recommend working with our allies to promote an 
American model of AI technology. But this trade war is actively 
undermining our ability to work with our allies to do so. Can 
you elaborate quickly on the steps that we should actually take 
to work with our allies to promote a U.S. model of AI usage and 
governance?
    Mr. Wang. Yes. So the first thing is we need to ensure that 
NIST, the National Institute of Standards, is properly 
resourced and we are able to make progress on AI measurement 
science and, ultimately, the development of these AI standards.
    Then we need to codify this into a set of standards that we 
ultimately agree with in terms of how we should measure AI 
performance, how we should--what are the characteristics of 
safe and performant AI systems in the future, and then we 
should utilize the global network of AI safety institutes, 
which is--which already exists. Many, many countries have stood 
them up, you know: France, the UK, Japan, India, Korea.
    I have met the heads of many of these AI safety institutes. 
They are all looking towards the United States because, you 
know, they understand that we are the leader in the technology, 
and we need to give them our standards and export it globally.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you.
    Ms. McClellan. Thank you, and I yield back.
    Mr. Guthrie. Thank you. The gentlelady's time--I had 
committed to Dr. Schmidt that he got--we have--Dr. Schrier did 
come in, but I committed to you, Dr. Schmidt, to leave.
    You--Dr. Schrier, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
    And if anybody else shows up, you are--I will let you walk 
out and go. Thank you for your--because it has been valuable. I 
will shut up and let her go.
    Ms. Schrier. I am so glad you are staying.
    Let's see. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank 
you to all our witnesses. This is a fantastic hearing.
    I am from the Pacific Northwest, and chip manufacturing and 
data center expansion are the big energy demand drivers to the 
region, so I am thrilled to have this discussion.
    We are at this inflection point. We all know that we are 
really headed straight to an energy crisis if we don't act 
quickly on this. It impacts AI and data centers, as we have 
heard a lot about, but also we have been talking nationally a 
lot about manufacturing, and we need affordable energy for 
that.
    One of the best ways to maximize access to the power we 
already have in the U.S. is strategically building out 
transmission. And last year Senators Manchin and Barrasso 
introduced the bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Act, and I 
will be really clear it is not the bill I would have written. I 
was not a fan of all the provisions. But we need to move 
forward, and that is the whole idea, that we need compromise in 
order to move the ball forward.
    Mr. Bhatia, in your testimony I see this prime example that 
you have talked about a couple places, a couple times, where 
this bill for speeding permitting would make a difference. It 
was the Boardman to Hemingway transmission project that 
connects Oregon to Idaho. And in the Pacific Northwest our peak 
energy demand is in the winter, when we turn on the heat, and 
yet we have our peak hydropower generation in the warmer 
months, when the snow melts. The opposite is true in the 
mountain region, where we see the opposite. So irrigation and 
air conditioning drive that demand and in the summer, and then 
wind energy is more abundant in the spring and winter.
    So connecting those two regions would allow us to correct 
this mismatch and meet the demand. The project, as you said, is 
about to hit its 21st birthday, and it has been stalled for 
almost 21 years.
    If we continue to require transmission projects to jump 
through all of these hoops and red tape, how is that going to 
hamper our ability to onshore tech, keep onshore tech, and 
expand manufacturing here at home?
    Mr. Bhatia. Well, absolutely, you know, EPRA is something 
we are absolutely supportive of because what it is going to do 
is exactly what you mentioned. You know, we have talked about 
investing in the grid, we have talked about modernizing the 
grid, creating more flexibility so that you can balance supply 
and demand.
    And, you know, the big data centers, certainly the large 
semiconductor manufacturing which we are under construction 
right now in Boise of what will be the largest--the only large-
scale memory manufacturing facility in the country, the first 
leading-edge one in more than 25 years--needs that transmission 
to be able to ensure that we can have that stable power for the 
consistent and long-term load growth that we have.
    Ms. Schrier. And Dr. Schmidt, basically, same question. If 
we don't have good transmission and the ability to move energy 
across the country, how does that impact our ability to remain 
dominant and win the AI race?
    Dr. Schmidt. When I think about your State, I think about 
all of the incredible natural resources you have, whether it is 
the west or east part of your State. That power does not have 
the path out of your State that is strong enough. It needs to 
get fixed.
    Ms. Schrier. Yes, thank you.
    I just want to emphasize for my Republican colleagues that 
if they introduce a bill like that one, they will have 
Democratic partners because we all understand, especially after 
this hearing, that we need to get----
    Mr. Bhatia. If I could just add one more, just one more 
thing to add to this.
    Ms. Schrier. Yes.
    Mr. Bhatia. It is not just about the success of those 
projects. I know we are talking a lot about AI, but it is about 
jobs that are being--that all of this investment in 
manufacturing are going to be creating, high-paying jobs, 
higher-paying jobs in--today.
    And domestic supply of semiconductors, while critical and 
important for AI, is also critical for many, many other 
industries that we haven't been able to talk about. The 
automotive industry, for example. Fifty percent of the cars on 
the road have a chip made in Micron's facility.
    Ms. Schrier. That is right, and we need to manufacture----
    Mr. Bhatia. And so there are many, many industries that 
need these projects to be successful.
    Ms. Schrier. I am going to turn one more question quickly 
to Dr. Schmidt.
    AI, as I read in Dr. Wang's testimony--Mr. Wang's 
testimony--brings potential benefit, potential risk. We have 
seen the abuse of AI in China for public surveillance and 
crackdowns. Now, unfortunately, I am having to think about that 
in our country, too, with what we are seeing now as suppression 
of dissent and retribution efforts to crack down on free speech 
and stymie scientific research, target nonviolent university 
protesters who I may not agree with, but we all have the First 
Amendment rights.
    And we have also seen insurance companies with Medicare 
Advantage use AI to deny or delay coverage. So as you think 
about--we only have--we actually don't have any time. If you 
could write me an answer to what you would suggest for 
guardrails for AI as we move forward, we want to be able to 
keep up and do this wisely.
    Dr. Schmidt. I will do so. Thank you very much.
    Ms. Schrier. Thank you.
    Mr. Guthrie. All right. Seeing no further folks here to ask 
questions, I ask unanimous consent to insert in the record the 
documents included on the staff hearing documents list.
    Without objection, that will be the order.
    [The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.]
    Mr. Guthrie. I remind Members they have 10 business days to 
submit questions for the record, and I ask the witnesses to 
respond to the questions promptly.
    Without objection, the committee is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 2:30 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
    [Material submitted for inclusion in the record follows:]
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