President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday, just six days before he leaves office, that aims to bolster the United States’ artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and “accelerate the clean energy transition.”
The executive order directs the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to lease federal property to the private sector to build “gigawatt-scale” AI data centers while enlisting the Department of the Interior to “identify lands it manages that are suitable for clean energy.” The move is the latest in a series of last-minute advances for the president’s green energy agenda, which includes a newly-announced crackdown for future offshore oil and gas drilling.
“This Executive Order will direct the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to lease federal sites where the private sector can build frontier AI infrastructure at speed and scale,” the official White House statement reads. “These efforts are designed to accelerate the clean energy transition in a way that is responsible and respectful to local communities, and in a way that does not impose any new costs on American families.”
I know many are skeptical about the need for clean energy.
Some don’t believe climate change is real – they’re wrong. The clean energy transition is already happening, and the United States must win.
This will shape the future of the global economy and the planet.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 14, 2025
The order defines “clean energy generation resources” as geothermal, nuclear fission and fusion, solar, wind, hydroelectric, hydrokinetic and marine energy — or any energy source that produces “few or no emissions of carbon dioxide.”
The energy consumed while training large language models (LLMs) has long been a concern for climate activists, who point out that AI and cryptocurrency data centers accounted for nearly 2% of global energy consumption in 2022 — a figure that could double by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The White House also called the development of U.S. AI infrastructure a “national security imperative” in the statement, emphasizing the need to prevent adversaries from harnessing the “powerful systems.”
“Domestic data centers for training and operating powerful AI models will help the United States facilitate AI’s safe and secure development, harness AI in service of national security, and prevent adversaries from accessing powerful systems to the detriment of our military and national-security,” the statement claims.
The administration added that the U.S. should not “sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water” in the effort to maintain AI dominance. Biden also announced Monday a new restriction on advanced semiconductor exports, which aims to prevent countries like China from training advanced LLMs.
The executive order is another eleventh-hour move in what appears to be an effort to stymy President-elect Donald Trump’s energy agenda, which is expected to include a vast expansion of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters. Biden announced a ban Monday for future offshore oil and gas activity across 625 million acres of the outer continental shelf, citing a law that could prevent a successive administration from easily reversing the policy.
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