WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday (Jan 14) to provide federal support to address massive energy needs for fast-growing advanced artificial intelligence data centres, the White House said.
The order calls for leasing federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments to host gigawatt-scale AI data centres and new clean power facilities – to address enormous power needs on a short time frame.
Biden said the order will “accelerate the speed at which we build the next generation of AI infrastructure here in America, in a way that enhances economic competitiveness, national security, AI safety, and clean energy”.
The order also requires companies tapping federal land for AI data centres to purchase an “appropriate share” of American-made semiconductors. The number of purchases required would be worked out on a case-by-case basis for each project and comes as the Biden administration is spending more than US$30 billion to subsidise US chip production.
“It’s really vital that we ensure that the AI industry can build out the infrastructure for training and using powerful AI models here in the United States,” White House technology adviser Tarun Chhabra told reporters.
He noted the volumes of computing power and electricity needed to train and operate frontier models – a term for the most advanced AI models available – “are increasing rapidly and set to surge even more”.
He said by around 2028 leading AI developers will be seeking to operate data centres with as much as five gigawatts of capacity for training AI models.
