Dive Brief:
- In a move to facilitate the growth of artificial intelligence in the U.S., President Joe Biden issued an executive order Tuesday designed to speed the construction of new data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them.
- The order will make federal sites available for AI data centers and new clean power facilities, facilitate this infrastructure’s interconnection to the electric grid, fulfill permitting obligations expeditiously and advance transmission development around federal sites.
- The Department of Energy and Department of Defense will be tasked with selecting federal sites that can be leased to companies to build “gigawatt-scale” data centers, while the Department of the Interior will identify available lands to build “clean energy infrastructure” to support the new data centers, according to the Jan. 14 White House statement.
Dive Insight:
Developers selected to build on federal sites will be required to bring online enough clean energy generation resources to match the full electricity needs of their data centers, the statement said.
To support these efforts, the DOE will take steps to promote distributed energy resources and support the safe and responsible deployment of nuclear energy, among other actions.
Agencies will prioritize and dedicate staff toward permitting these projects in a timely manner, and the DOD will immediately undertake environmental analyses that will improve the speed and accuracy of future site-specific reviews, the order said. Agencies will identify further opportunities to support expeditious permitting at these sites, such as by applying or establishing “categorical exclusions” — the fastest form of review under the National Environmental Policy Act — for infrastructure that does not significantly affect the environment.
The order also seeks to accelerate the upgrade and development of transmission lines around those sites and facilitate interconnection of AI infrastructure to the electric grid.
“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 in the news release.
As businesses increasingly rely on artificial intelligence, construction of new data centers has boomed. Current projects include a $1 billion Microsoft data center in Indiana, a $800 million Meta data center in Alabama and a $630 million digital data center in Northern Virginia.
To meet the large energy demands of these facilities, tech giants are increasingly turning to nuclear power. That connection between data centers and nuclear power plants should continue to strengthen, Gordon Dolven, director of data center research at CBRE, a Dallas-based commercial real estate services firm, told Construction Dive in November.
“This role is expected to grow, especially with advancements like small modular reactors,” said Dolven. “[These] offer scalable and flexible solutions to support future energy needs.”
