U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday directing the development of artificial intelligence data centres on six federal land sites, with a special focus on powering them with clean energy and upholding high labour standards.
Biden said in a statement that the United States is the world leader in AI, but cannot take that lead for granted. “We will not let America be out-built when it comes to the technology that will define the future, nor should we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water,” Biden said.
The order calls for the Department of Defense and Department of Energy to each identify three suitable sites where private companies will lease the land, pay for the construction and operation of the data centres and ensure the supply of enough clean energy to fully power the sites.
The developers will also have to buy “an appropriate share” of semiconductors produced in the United States to help ensure there is a “robust domestic semiconductor supply chain,” the White House said. In addition to identifying the sites, the federal government will also commit under the order to expedite the permitting process for the data centre construction.
Senior administration officials, in a phone call with journalists previewing the order, highlighted the national security need for the United States to have its own powerful AI infrastructure, both to protect it for its own use and also to prevent adversaries such as China from possessing those capabilities.
“From the national security standpoint, it’s really critical to find a pathway for building the data centres and power infrastructure to support frontier AI operations here in the United States to ensure that the most powerful AI models continue to be trained and stored securely here in the United States,” an official said.
A senior administration official cited the priority of making sure the AI industry had an anchor in the United States to avoid repeating the history of other technologies that moved offshore to areas with lower labour and environmental standards as well.
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Source:
The Voice of America