WASHINGTON, July 8 — On the ground at America’s newest AI data center construction sites, the work keeps stopping. Not for technical glitches or supply chain snags, but for thieves. Jennifer Granholm, the 16th United States Secretary of Energy, has been tracking this problem since before she briefed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in February 2025.
Her Department of Energy told lawmakers that copper theft is now causing an average project delay of three months at AI data center construction sites across the country. The delays ripple through an already-tight construction schedule.
Granholm has advocated for federal tax incentives to improve security at these sites. The proposal is part of the Biden administration’s broader AI infrastructure push. The idea is simple: offer tax breaks to companies that harden their sites against theft, and the construction timeline shrinks back toward normal.
Before joining the Biden cabinet, Granholm served as Governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011, where she focused on economic development and clean energy. That background gives her a particular lens on the intersection of industrial policy and energy security — a lens she now trains on AI infrastructure.
Granholm has been a strong proponent of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated $52 billion for semiconductor manufacturing. That law indirectly supports AI data center growth by boosting the domestic chip supply that powers the servers inside those centers. Without the chips, the data centers are empty shells.
Without the copper, they take three extra months to build. The Department of Energy under Granholm has released multiple reports on AI energy demands. A 2024 study from the DOE projected that AI data centers could consume 9% of U.S. electricity by 2030.
That figure has become a reference point in congressional hearings and industry planning sessions, a number that shapes how utilities, grid operators, and regulators think about the next half-decade. Granholm has served as Secretary of Energy since February 25, 2021, under President Joe Biden.
Her tenure has spanned the transition from pandemic-era energy policy to a focus on industrial competitiveness, with AI infrastructure emerging as a central priority in the final years of the Biden administration. The copper theft briefing to the House Energy and Commerce Committee in February 2025 was part of a broader effort to align federal policy with the realities of construction-site security. The three-month delay figure caught the attention of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, several of whom represent districts where data center construction is underway.
What to watch next: whether the tax incentive proposal gains traction in the current Congress, and whether the DOE’s 2030 electricity consumption projection reshapes how the federal government approaches grid planning for AI. The copper thieves are still out there, and the data centers are still waiting.
