Los Angeles — The president Joe Biden signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence on Tuesday that seeks to guarantee the infrastructure necessary for advanced operations of Artificial intelligence (AI)such as large-scale data centers and new clean energy facilities, that can be built quickly in the United States.
The executive order directs federal agencies to accelerate the development of large-scale AI infrastructure at government sites, while imposing requirements and safeguards on developers who build at 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 electric grid and help expedite the permitting process.
In a statement, Biden said that AI will have “profound implications for national security and enormous potential to improve the lives of Americans if harnessed responsibly, from helping to cure diseases to keeping communities safe by mitigating the effects of climate change”.
“However, we cannot take our leadership for granted,” the Democratic president said. “We will not allow America to be surpassed 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 Defense and Energy departments will each identify at least three sites where the private sector can build AI data centers. The agencies will conduct “competitive bidding” from private companies to build artificial intelligence data centers at those federal sites, senior administration officials said.
Developers who build on those sites will be required, among other things, to pay for the construction of those facilities and to provide sufficient clean energy generation to cover the full 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.
With less than a week until President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a big 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-intensive 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 electrical grid is something obvious that would be useful for the next administration, no matter what their priorities are in terms of sustainability or climate”.
Biden said the efforts are designed to accelerate the transition to clean energy in a way that is “responsible and respectful of local communities” and that does not add costs to average Americans. 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 said.
That kind of investment will also prevent the United States from relying on other countries for access to AI tools, said Tarun Chhabra, deputy presidential assistant and national security and technology coordinator.
The executive order comes after the Biden administration announced proposed new restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence chips with the goal of 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 officials from the European Union on export restrictions that would affect 120 countries.