The Environmental Protection Agency will not establish nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the rapidly expanding data center industry, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin confirmed Wednesday.
Zeldin made the announcement at the POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington, arguing that states and local communities are better positioned than federal regulators to determine appropriate standards.
“Ten times out of 10, I’m not going to sit inside of an agency building in Washington, D.C., and that we say that we know that local community in Georgia or Florida or Arizona or elsewhere, better than everyone there locally,” Zeldin said.
The decision reflects the Trump administration’s broader preference for devolving regulatory authority to state and local governments rather than imposing top-down federal mandates on emerging industries.
Zeldin acknowledged that technologies and practices exist which can meaningfully reduce air pollution and water consumption associated with data center operations.
He specifically pointed to closed-loop data center designs as one example of infrastructure that does not draw on local water supplies, presenting them as a model for responsible development.
“While we hear these stories of the worst-case data center that is most controversial and has the most amount of opposition, we might hear less about the data center that is following all the best practices,” Zeldin said.
“It is important, as more builds are getting done, that they are following those best practices, not the worst practices,” he added, framing voluntary adoption of cleaner designs as the preferred path forward.
Public support for data center construction remains limited, with just 37 percent of Americans saying they would support a data center being built in their area, according to a POLITICO poll conducted earlier this year.
Opponents of new data center developments frequently cite water usage and air pollution as their primary concerns, issues that federal environmental standards could have directly addressed had the EPA chosen to act.
The decision leaves a fragmented regulatory landscape, with individual states and municipalities responsible for setting their own terms when negotiating with data center developers seeking to build in their communities.
The data center industry has seen explosive growth driven by rising demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure, making the question of environmental oversight increasingly urgent for communities across the country.
