The American president’s decision seeks to ensure the necessary infrastructure for advanced AI operations

United States President Joseph Biden signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence aimed at ensuring the necessary infrastructure for advanced AI operations, such as large-scale data centers and new clean energy facilities that can be quickly built in the United States.

The executive order instructs federal agencies to accelerate the development of large-scale AI infrastructure on government sites, while also imposing requirements and safeguards on developers building in those locations. It also directs certain agencies to make federal sites available for AI data centers and new clean energy facilities. These agencies will help facilitate the interconnection of infrastructure with the power grid and assist in expediting the permitting process.

In a statement, Biden said AI will have “profound implications for national security and enormous potential to improve the lives of Americans if harnessed responsibly—from helping cure diseases to keeping communities safe by mitigating the effects of climate change.”

“However, we cannot take our leadership for granted,” said the Democratic president. “We will not allow the United States to be outpaced in the technology that will define the future, nor should we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and water.”

Under the new rules, the Departments of Defense and Energy will each identify at least three sites where the private sector can build AI data centers. The agencies will carry out “competitive bids” from private companies to build artificial intelligence data centers on those federal sites, senior administration officials said.

Developers building on those sites will be required, among other things, to pay for the construction of those facilities and to provide enough clean energy generation to cover the total capacity needs of their data centers. Although the U.S. government will lease land to a company, that company will own the materials it creates there, officials said.

Less than a week before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a major question is whether the incoming administration will maintain or rescind the new order. Much of the order’s focus is on reducing bottlenecks in connecting energy-hungry data centers to new sources of electricity.

“It has to be a priority because otherwise there will be blackouts, there will be citizens or businesses affected by this,” said computer scientist Sacha Luccioni, climate lead at AI company Hugging Face. “Facilitating the interconnection of infrastructure to the power grid is an obvious move that would be useful for the next administration, regardless of their priorities in terms of sustainability or climate.”

Biden said the efforts are designed to accelerate the clean energy transition in a “responsible way that respects local communities” and that does not add costs for the average American. Developers selected to build on government sites will be required to pay all costs of building and operating the AI infrastructure so that the development does not increase electricity prices for consumers, the administration stated.

That kind of investment will also prevent the United States from relying on other countries to access AI tools, said Tarun Chhabra, deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for technology and national security.

The executive order comes after the Biden administration proposed new restrictions on AI chip exports, aimed at balancing national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries. That proposal raised concerns from chip industry executives as well as European Union officials about export restrictions affecting 120 countries.