Last week, on one of his final days in office, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at boosting the development of energy facilities and data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Executive Order 14141 directs the secretaries of Defense, Energy and the Interior to lease sites on federal land to private sector companies for the purpose of building data centers and energy generation and transmission facilities. Noting that AI technology has become, and is expected to remain, a “defining technology of our era,” and that both economic and national security risks could arise if the United States falls behind in the race to build AI infrastructure, the Order seeks to reduce regulatory barriers to these projects by speeding the permitting process, and ambitiously seeks to enable construction at these federal sites to commence by January 1, 2026.
