The Trump administration’s new AI policy push does more than address computing and infrastructure. It also points directly at environmental permitting, including Clean Water Act rules that can shape where and how data centers are built.
At issue is Section 404, the part of the law that covers activities affecting federally protected waters. The White House recommendations echo requests made earlier this year by the Data Center Coalition and Meta, both of which asked regulators to make the process easier for data center projects.
What the AI agenda proposes
Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of AI policy recommendations meant to "usher in a new golden age of human flourishing." Alongside that broader AI agenda, an executive order and the AI Action Plan include recommendations that would loosen Clean Water Act permitting processes for data centers.
The specific target is Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. That section applies when projects could affect protected waters during construction or use, including materials discharged into those waters or dredged from them.
Projects such as building a bridge or road, filling marshland to construct a building, or redirecting a stream can require a Section 404 permit. These are often called 404 permits.
Individual 404 permits can be expensive and time-consuming. The federal government also has a system of nationwide permits for certain activities and industries. Those permits can reduce public participation and federal review compared with individual project approvals.
The Trump AI agenda seeks this kind of nationwide permit for data centers. It also recommends exempting data centers from pre-construction notification, a form that helps regulators understand a project’s impacts before work begins.
Industry requests came first
In March, the Data Center Coalition, or DCC, submitted a public comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy as part of the process for developing the AI Action Plan. The DCC is a data center industry lobbying group whose members include Google and Amazon Web Services.
In that comment, the DCC recommended smoothing the Section 404 permitting process for data centers. Meta, which is a DCC member, made a similar request in its own separate response.
The DCC called for a nationwide permit with "robust notification and coverage thresholds" and argued that "lengthy timelines for the approvals are not consistent with other national permits that have higher or no limits or have a threshold where a PCN is not needed, which allows immediate action."
Meta also asked for a nationwide permit and suggested that the federal government further "streamline" the 404 permitting process. Meta has announced its intent to build massive data centers across multiple states and is developing a 2,250-acre data center in Louisiana.
Cy McNeill, the director of federal affairs at DCC, told WIRED by email that "The data center industry takes compliance and accountability seriously and works closely with the many local, state, regional, and federal bodies responsible for permitting and project approvals, regulation in environmental, safety, and other key areas, and oversight."
Why wetlands and waterways matter
Environmental lawyers who spoke with WIRED emphasized that the direct impacts of data centers depend on the details of each project. Many data centers may have relatively low environmental profiles when looking only at the buildings themselves.
But the permitting question is not only about the building. It is also about the land and water around it. A project may involve filling a wetland, rebuilding a stream crossing, or changing the conditions of protected water during construction.
Jim McElfish, a senior adviser at the Environmental Law Institute, described the pressure on undeveloped land this way: "For a while there was a joke that Walmarts were being built on wetlands, because it’s like, well, where’s the land that hasn’t already been developed?"
There are currently more than 50 issued nationwide 404 permits, and some still require pre-construction notifications. These permits are renewed once every five years.
Many existing exemptions cover agricultural activities, such as cranberry harvesting and constructing ponds for farms. Others apply to ecosystem and scientific services such as surveying and soil maintenance. Some types of coal mining and oil and gas activity are also included in the program.
Buildings such as stores, restaurants, hospitals, and schools already have their own nationwide permit, and some data centers can fall under it. But if a project affects more than half an acre of protected water, that permit requires a more detailed individual analysis.
Lawyers question a broad exemption
The central concern from environmental lawyers is whether a nationwide permit for data centers, regardless of size, fits the intent of the Clean Water Act. The same category of facility can have very different effects depending on the site.
McElfish said, "What makes [a blanket data center exemption] a little bit tricky is that the impacts are gonna differ quite a bit depending on where these are." He noted that one project may affect only a "fraction of an acre," while another in a different part of the country could have much larger impacts on local waterways during construction.
Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, made a similar argument. She said, "What we’re seeing here is an attempt to expand the 404 nationwide permitting program so that it goes through this much reduced regulatory review outside of the intention of why [the permitting] program was created."
Connor added, "There’s much reduced regulatory review to kind of literally speed along the paving of wetlands."
Some current data center projects have already faced water-related scrutiny. In Indiana, Amazon is drawing local opposition as it seeks to fill in nearly 10 acres of wetland and more than 5,000 feet of streams to build a massive data center. In Alabama, environmentalists caution that the water footprint from a proposed data center could seriously affect local waterways and possibly contribute to the extinction of a species of fish.
Amazon spokesperson Heather Layman sent WIRED details on the company’s global water replenishment projects and efforts to conserve water at its Indiana data centers. She wrote, "To maintain global leadership in AI, the US must prioritize the deployment of energy generation and infrastructure to support data center growth." She also wrote, "We are also constantly working to optimize our water consumption across Amazon’s operations."
The larger permitting fight
For critics of the proposal, the data center debate is part of a longer fight over the 404 permitting program. Connor told WIRED, "The 404 permitting program has had a developer target on its back for a pretty long time."
She pointed to Sackett v. EPA, the 2023 Supreme Court case based on a 404 permitting issue, which dealt a major blow to the reach of the Clean Water Act. Connor suspects the ruling is one reason more companies may be choosing to build data centers in dry states like Arizona.
As she put it, "They have a lot of waters that have lost their jurisdictional reach within the Clean Water Act." She added, "It's just easier to pave over the desert, which is the saddest thing to say out loud."
The policy question now is whether data centers should receive a broader permitting path as AI infrastructure expands. The industry argues that faster approvals are needed for investment and growth. Environmental lawyers argue that wetlands, streams, and local waterways require project-by-project attention because the impacts are not uniform.