At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump — flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil — said that “the most important man of the day” was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. “He’s gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?” Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era air pollution regulations.
If Trump has his way, the next generation of data centers will run dirtier than the last. It isn’t enough to kill renewables and pave the way for more coal and gas plants to power energy-hungry AI data centers. Trump is also obsessed with tossing out environmental protections.
“It costs much more to do things environmentally clean,” Trump claimed in an interview with Joe Rogan in October 2024. Upon his appointment to head the EPA (or, rather, run it into the ground), Zeldin said that he would be focused on “unleash[ing] US energy dominance” and “mak[ing] America the AI capital of the world.” The EPA announced thousands of layoffs on on July 18th, gutting its research and development arm.
“It costs much more to do things environmentally clean.”
At the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, Trump attempted to take credit for private investments totaling around $36 billion for data center projects and $56 million for new energy infrastructure. The ceremony itself was mostly pomp and circumstance, but it’s telling that the Trump administration says it wants to make Pennsylvania a new hub for AI data centers. It’s a swing state that Republicans are eager to move into their column, but it’s also a major coal and gas producer. Sitting atop a major gas reserve, fracking in Pennsylvania (as well as Texas) helped usher in the “shale revolution” in the 2000s that made the US the world’s leading gas producer.
That was supposed to start changing under former President Joe Biden’s direction. He set a goal for the US to get all its electricity from carbon pollution-free sources by 2035. And in 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which was full of tax incentives to make it cheaper to build out new solar and wind farms, as well as other carbon-free energy sources. If it had stayed intact, the law was expected to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by around 40 percent this decade.
The law came at a crucial time for tech companies, which were expanding data centers as the AI arms race picked up steam. Electricity demand in the US is rising for the first time in more than a decade, thanks in large part to energy-hungry data centers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and other tech giants all have their own climate goals, pledging to shrink their carbon footprints by supporting renewable energy projects.
But Trump is making it harder to build those projects in the US. Republicans voted to wind down Biden-era tax incentives for solar and wind energy in the big spending bill they passed this month. The bill will likely decrease electricity generation capacity in 2035 by 340 GW, according to one analysis, with the vast majority of losses coming from solar and wind farms that will no longer get built.
All these new data centers still need to get their electricity from somewhere. “They won’t be powered by wind,” Trump said during the summit, repeating misleading talking points about renewable energy that have become a cornerstone of new climate denial. He signed an executive order in April, directing the Commerce, Energy, and Interior Departments to study “where coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers.” Trump, backed by fossil fuel donors, campaigned on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” — a slogan that he doubled down on again at the event. He also referenced the Homer City Generating Station, an old coal plant that’s reopening as a gas plant that will power a new data center.
The deals announced at the summit include Enbridge investing $1 billion to expand its gas pipelines into Pennsylvania and Equinor spending $1.6 billion to “boost natural gas production at Equinor’s Pennsylvania facilities and explore opportunities to link gas to flexible power generation for data centers.”
“They won’t be powered by wind.”
Data centers are a “main driver” for a boom in new gas pipelines and power plants in the Southeast, according to a January report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The Southeast is home to “data center alley,” a hub in Virginia through which around 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic flows through. Even if AI models become more efficient over time, the amount of electricity they’re currently projected to demand could lock communities across the US into prolonged reliance on fossil fuels as utilities build out new gas infrastructure.
Zeldin’s job now is essentially to remove any regulatory hurdles that might slow down that growth. From his first day in office, “it was clear that EPA would have a major hand in permitting reform to cut down barriers that have acted as a roadblock so we can bolster the growth of AI,” as Zeldin wrote in a Fox News op-ed last week. “A company looking to build an industrial facility or a power plant should be able to build what it can before obtaining an emissions permit,” he added. And after moving to roll back pollution regulations for power plants, the Trump administration is now reportedly working on a rule that would undo the 2009 “endangerment finding” that allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Zeldin also writes that when it comes to Clean Air Act permits for polluters it considers “minor emitters,” the EPA will only meet “minimum requirements for public participation.” An AI Action Plan that the White House dropped on July 23rd proposes creating new categorical exclusions for data center-related projects from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a sunshine law that mandates input from local communities on major federal projects. The plan directs agencies to identify federal lands for the “large-scale development” of data centers and power generation.
There are other factors at play that could derail Trump’s fossil-fueled agenda, including a backlog for gas turbines in high demand. Solar and wind farms are still generally faster to build and a more affordable source of new electricity than coal or gas, and we could see some developers rush to complete projects before Biden-era tax credits fully disappear. One early bright spot for renewables was the fact that data centers used to train AI are theoretically easier to build close to far-flung wind and solar projects. Unlike other data centers, they don’t need to be built near population centers to reduce latency. They could also theoretically time their operations to match the ebb and flow of electricity generation when the sun shines and winds blow.
But so far, things are shaping up differently in the real world. “It’s just a race to get connected as quickly as possible,” says Nathalie Limandibhratha, senior associate US power at BloombergNEF.
Data center developers are also concerned that if they build facilities specifically to train AI closer to renewable energy, they could be left with stranded assets down the road. They’d rather keep building data centers close to population centers where they can repurpose the facility for other uses if needed. They also get more bang for their buck running 24/7, so data centers are leaning toward around-the-clock electricity generation from gas and nuclear energy (and nuclear energy has more bipartisan support than other sources of carbon-free energy).
“There’s no question right now that AI is driving greater fossil fuel use in the United States and really setting us back in terms of climate change,” says Cathy Kunkel, an energy consultant at IEEFA. Tech giants Google and Amazon made announcements coinciding with the Pennsylvania summit committing to purchasing hydropower and nuclear energy, respectively. But their most recent sustainability reports show that their greenhouse gas pollution is still growing, taking them further away from their climate goals of reaching net zero emissions.
“If [tech companies] wanted to meet their sustainability goals, they could do so,” Kunkel says. “They’re getting a free pass, obviously, from the Trump administration.”
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![EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/EON-Co-Founders_Horizontal_Philip-Cheung.jpg?resize=1200%2C898&ssl=1 "EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive")
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