WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) and

other AI leaders on Thursday will urge U.S. lawmakers to

streamline federal permitting for artificial intelligence energy

needs and open more government data sets for AI training,

according to written testimony reviewed by Reuters.

"America's advanced economy relies on 50-year-old

infrastructure that cannot meet the increasing electricity

demands driven by AI, reshoring of manufacturing, and increased

electrification," Microsoft ( MSFT ) President Brad Smith's written

testimony says for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on

"Winning the AI Race".

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will tell senators that as AI systems

improve people will want to use them more, and meeting that

demand will require more chips, training data, energy and

supercomputers. "We want to build a brain for the world and make

it super easy for people to use it, with common-sense

restrictions to prevent harm," Altman's testimony says.

CoreWeave ( CRWV ) CEO Michael Intrator's written

testimony highlights the energy-intensity of AI computation,

citing an Energy Department estimate that data centers'

consumption could rise to 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028 from

4.4% in 2023.

"Millions of hours of training, billions of inference

queries, trillions of model parameters, and continuous dynamic

scaling are all driving an insatiable hunger for compute and

energy that borders on exponential," he said.

He called for efforts "to streamline the permitting

process to enable the addition of new sources of generation and

the transmission infrastructure to deliver it."

AMD CEO Lisa Su will tell senators leading in AI

requires "rapidly building data centers at scale and powering

them with reliable, affordable, and clean energy sources."

She added "moving faster also means moving AI beyond the

cloud. To ensure every American benefits, AI must be built into

the devices we use every day and made as accessible and

dependable as electricity."

Smith called for opening U.S. government data sets for AI

training, citing actions by China and the United Kingdom.

"The federal government remains one of the largest

untapped sources of high-quality and high-volume data," Smith

said. "By making government data readily available for AI

training, the United States can significantly accelerate the

advancement of AI capabilities."