Biden administration opens up federal land to AI data centers

With less than a week left in office, President Joe Biden is not done leaving his mark on the AI industry.

President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that will allow private sector AI companies to lease federal sites owned by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy in order to build AI data centers. Companies that build data centers on these sites will be required to bring online enough clean energy resources to match the electricity needed to power the data centers.

This is not a grant program. AI companies that build data centers on these federal sites will need to pay the full cost to build, operate, and maintain them.

In a press release, the White House said that this order is meant to strengthen and secure the U.S.’s global leadership on AI and prevent domestic AI companies from depending on other countries to access AI tools and infrastructure. It added that the proper resources will be awarded for these departments to ensure they can inspect and approve bids for federal sites quickly and efficiently.

The executive order’s emphasis on renewable energy here seems notable. Data centers currently consume 4% of all the U.S.’s power, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, and that figure is expected to grow to 9% by the end of the decade. Overall, data center power demand is expected to double over the next five years, according to a report by JLL.

This executive order comes just one day after the Biden Administration announced a new set of rules and guidelines regarding AI chip exports that imposed further restrictions on a number of countries, including adversaries like China and Russia, while also imposing a 50,000 chip quota for the majority of the rest of the world.

The caveat is that these orders come just a week before Donald Trump returns to the presidency, where he is expected to reverse a lot of Biden administration policies.