#offshore artificial intelligence developers

The answer is to wrap AI in legal form. Give an autonomous system a recognizable legal identity and you make it legible to law. You create a defined target to which responsibility and damages can attach. You make the agent’s conduct visible, traceable, and accountable. The modern corporation, the series LLC, and the public benefit corporation were each contested when introduced, then widely adopted. The artificial intelligence company, or AIC, is the most recent iteration of a corporate legal structure – and set to be the most consequential. Delaware, the state with the deepest experience in entity formation and governance, is proposing a new entity form called the AIC and it plans to test an AICs impact within a regulatory sandbox. The framework for industry engagement with AICs is being developed in Delaware as part of a public-private partnership led by Norm Ai. A Delaware AIC will be a separate legal entity whose day-to-day affairs are managed by an AI agent rather than a person. At the agent’s direction, the AIC can sue and be sued in its own name, hold and dispose of property, and incur obligations. It has a single member, a person or an entity, responsible for keeping the AIC adequately capitalized, and the AIC must keep a log of its activities. That member is shielded from the AIC’s debts, except where it fails to capitalize the company or uses it to commit fraud or a willful violation of law. These are real protections. Counterparties know they are dealing with a temporary, autonomous entity and where to turn if something goes wrong. The liability shield exists only inside the sandbox, and only for participants that follow the rules. Consumer-protection and criminal law apply in full. The point is to pilot agentic commerce in daylight, under supervision, with capital tied to liability and the ability to shut a system down.Autonomous commerce is possible with today’s technology. The only open question is where it finds a home. If the United States does not offer a careful, accountable one, the activity will migrate offshore and onto anonymous infrastructure beyond the reach of any court. Instead, Delaware could govern this technology inside the American legal tradition, where it can be observed, tested, and held to account.

China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country's strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.

The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.

With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.

This feature solves one of the main energy consumption challenges of conventional data centers, where air conditioning systems typically account for 40 to 50 percent of the total electricity required to operate.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

A half-century-old Pennsylvania power plant fueled by oil and natural gas will keep running beyond its scheduled shutdown date following an order from the Trump administration just one day before it was due to retire.

The Eddystone Generating Station near Philadelphia was to close permanently last Saturday because its owner determined it no longer made economic sense to run.

But an order from the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday directed the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, and grid manager PJM Interconnection to take “all measures necessary” to ensure that the two remaining generation units at the plant are available to operate. The order is effective until Aug. 28 and can be extended.

“Operational availability and economic dispatch of the aforementioned Eddystone Units 3 and 4 is necessary to best meet the emergency and serve the public interest,” said the order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He said the 90-day duration of the order was also intended to “minimize adverse environmental impacts.”

The order said the continued operation is justified by a national “energy emergency” declared by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, and by PJM’s responsibility to ensure electric reliability. On April 8, Trump issued another executive order saying that all available electricity supplies “must” be used to meet an unprecedented increase in national demand for power, especially to run artificial intelligence data centers. At the same time, the Trump administration has cracked down on efforts to expand renewable energy, including an executive order to freeze development of new offshore wind projects.

Excerpt:

The U.S. economy desperately needs more electricity. Demand is projected to outstrip supply in the coming years, largely due to data centers powering artificial intelligence. That leaves the government no choice: To avoid an energy crisis, it needs to supersize the nation’s electrical grid.

The Trump administration, apparently, hasn’t gotten the memo. Instead, it’s allowing its opposition to clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, to stymie growth.

Case in point: The Energy Department’s cancellation last month of a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for a major transmission project in the Midwest. The line, known as the Grain Belt Express, would cross 800 miles of farmland to deliver wind energy generated in Kansas to power more than 3 million homes in the region. This is exactly the sort of development the country needs to strengthen the grid and make use of its natural wind resources.

Yet the administration sided with NIMBYs who have long opposed the project, which has been in the works for more than a decade. The Energy Department explained in its announcement that it was “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the project. It also claimed that the project is “unlikely” to meet the conditions required for the loan guarantee — without clearly laying out those conditions.

Invenergy, the company behind the project, has said it will pursue private financing. Hopefully that materializes, and ideally such undertakings could happen without any government backing. But the loss of the loan guarantee poses a serious threat both to the transmission line and to the renewable energy projects that would have been built to supply it.

Such paralysis is now typical of the U.S. energy system. Despite ever-increasing demand for electricity, construction of the new transmission lines needed to deliver it has slowed to a glacial pace. That’s because building the infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions is expensive and comes with painful regulatory headaches. And far too often, politics gets in the way, especially when it requires construction on privately owned land.

In 2024, only 322 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines were completed, one of the lowest annual figures in the past 15 years. An Energy Department study last year projected that, to meet the nation’s energy needs most optimally, regional transmission capacity would need to double by 2050 and interregional capacity would need to rise by a factor of 3.5. That would require the nation to build more than 5,000 miles of transmission lines a year, according to Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.

Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to “unleash American energy,” his administration seems to be actively working against that lofty goal. This month, New York’s Public Service Commission halted a new transmission line that would bring the state’s offshore wind power to New York City. Why? Because Trump’s executive order to stop offshore wind developments makes the power lines risky for taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the administration seems to be trying to kill solar and wind projects by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. This month, the Interior Department issued a directive requiring virtually every aspect of such developments on federal land — or those that pass through it via transmission lines — to receive personal approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum or his deputy. That policy change came shortly after Congress passed its reconciliation package, which restricted access to tax credits for any wind and solar project that does not begin construction by July 4, 2026. A bottleneck seems to be the goal.

The administration justifies its antisolar and -wind posture by arguing that other forms of energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power, are more reliable. It also leans on national security concerns, since China controls much of the supply chain for those industries.

Excerpt from this essay by Bill McKibben published by The New Yorker:

The misuse of power under Donald Trump is to be taken for granted. Monday ’s list of executive actions on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry was entirely expected—this time around, there is no hesitation about withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (a decision that took four months in his first term), nor about opening up new lands for drilling, nor about rolling back regulations that have encouraged the production of electric cars. In fact, consider them all promises kept—in April of 2024, in a closed-door meeting soon uncovered by the pre-traumatized Washington Post, Trump laid out the terms to industry leaders. [The quote is from trump's begging for a billion dollars from the fossil fuel industry.]

The executives responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had originally supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries) took the lead, working the phones assiduously. “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up,” an admiring Trump explained at one event. But in this case he stuck his finger in his phone and what came up was money. The Post again: “Hamm is working ‘incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,’ said a Trump campaign aide. ‘We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.’ ”

As I say, no one seems to shake their head at any of that anymore. It’s corrupt, but a kind of corruption legalized by the Supreme Court, in Citizens United and other decisions; we’re beginning to take it for granted that government power will be used on behalf of the highest bidder.

The corruption of language, however, is slightly different. Trump—a master at directing the focus where he wants it to be—also used Monday’s signing sessions to declare a “national energy emergency.” This, one aide says, will “unlock a variety of different authorities” that let him make these changes more easily—but the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no energy emergency. America has been producing oil and gas at record levels—indeed, oil-industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down. (Trump’s executive orders, by halting the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms, would effectively limit the amount of energy the country could potentially generate.)

This energy emergency supposedly stems from a need to provide more power to data centers, so that we can beat China in developing the grail of artificial intelligence. “The national-energy emergency is crucial because we are in an A.I. race with China, and our ability to produce domestic American energy is so crucial such that we can generate the electricity and power that’s needed to stay at the global forefront of technology,” a Trump official, speaking not for attribution to reporters, said, on the morning of the Inauguration.

But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”

The actual emergency, obviously, is with the climate. The past two years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2023, Canadian fires filled American skies with choking smoke; 2024 saw Hurricane Helene devastate southern Appalachia; 2025 dawned with the Los Angeles inferno. For years, activists tried to persuade Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, mostly in an effort to focus attention and action on the crisis. Biden instead worked hard to build out clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, virtuous work that got him, and the climate crisis, almost no attention at all.

So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.

But it’s unlikely that he will fool the Chinese, who are building renewable energy faster than anyone. And it is almost certain he will fail to confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will go on melting, or its forests and grasslands, which will go on burning, or its seas, which will go on rising. When we want to describe the folly of our leaders, we often invoke the example of King Canute, smiting the sea with his sceptre to hold back the waves. Canute, however, was wilier than our usual version of the legend—he was actually trying to show his flattering courtiers that there were limits to his power. The twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntingdon says that, as the water swept past, Canute declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix and never wore it again, “to the honor of God the almighty King.”