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With less than a week in office, President Joe Biden isn’t done making his mark on the AI industry.
President Biden issued a executive order on Tuesday that will allow private sector AI companies to lease federal Department of Defense and Department of Energy sites to build AI data centers. Companies that build data centers on these sites will be required to bring enough clean energy resources online to match the electricity needed to power the data centers.
This is not a grant program. AI companies that build data centers at these federal sites must pay the full cost to build, operate and maintain them.
In a press release, the White House said that this order is intended to strengthen and ensure the global leadership of the United States on AI and prevent domestic AI companies from depending on other countries for access to tools and AI infrastructure. He added that adequate resources will be allocated for these departments to ensure that they can inspect and approve bids for federal sites quickly and efficiently.
The executive order’s emphasis on renewable energy here seems remarkable. Data centers currently consume 4% of all US power, according to the Electric Power Research Instituteand that figure is expected to rise to 9% by the end of the decade. In general, data center energy demand is predictable double in the next five yearsaccording to a report by JLL.
This executive order comes just one day after the Biden administration announced a new one set of rules and guidelines regarding AI chip exports imposing further restrictions on a number of countries, including adversaries such as China and Russia, while also imposing a 50,000 chip quota for most of the rest of the world.
The warning is that these orders come just a week before the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, where he is expected to reverse many policies of the Biden administration.
