President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday, just six days before he leaves office, that aims to bolster the United States’ artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and “accelerate the clean energy transition.” [emphasis, links added]
The executive order directs the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to lease federal property to the private sector to build “gigawatt-scale” AI data centers while enlisting the Department of the Interior to “identify lands it manages that are suitable for clean energy.”
The move is the latest in a series of last-minute advances for the president’s green energy agenda, which includes a newly announced crackdown for future offshore oil and gas drilling.
“This Executive Order will direct the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to lease federal sites where the private sector can build frontier AI infrastructure at speed and scale,” the official White House statement reads.
“These efforts are designed to accelerate the clean energy transition in a way that is responsible and respectful to local communities, and in a way that does not impose any new costs on American families.”
The order defines “clean energy generation resources” as geothermal, nuclear fission and fusion, solar, wind, hydroelectric, hydrokinetic, and marine energy — or any energy source that produces “few or no emissions of carbon dioxide.”
The energy consumed while training large language models (LLMs) has long been a concern for climate activists, who point out that AI and cryptocurrency data centers accounted for nearly 2% of global energy consumption in 2022 — a figure that could double by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The White House also called the development of U.S. AI infrastructure a “national security imperative” in the statement, emphasizing the need to prevent adversaries from harnessing the “powerful systems.” …snip…
Biden also announced Monday a new restriction on advanced semiconductor exports, which aims to prevent countries like China from training advanced LLMs.
The executive order is another eleventh-hour move in what appears to be an effort to stymy President-elect Donald Trump’s energy agenda, which is expected to include a vast expansion of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters.
Read full post at Daily Caller
That Executive Order is going actually nowhere. These depts are not going to have any chance of implementing anything before the heads are sent packing. Even if they could get something going who in their right mind that would be spend a vast amount of money for such an AI datacenter agree to have it powered by wind and solar? These datacenters (like all others) need to have reliable 24×7 electricity, something so-called green energy has failed to deliver anywhere.
Biden the Worst doomed his own hope for reelection with his Tyranny Orders and he belong in Prison for Treason with Bill Clinton and Obama