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Dive brief:
- In a move to facilitate the growth of artificial intelligence in the US, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday designed to accelerate 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 energy facilities, make it easier to interconnect that infrastructure to the electric grid, quickly meet permitting obligations and move the development of transmission to federal sites.
- The Energy Department and the Defense Department will be responsible for selecting federal sites that can be leased to companies to build “gigawatt-scale” data centers, while the Interior Department will identify available land to build “clean energy infrastructure” to support. the new data centers, according to the statement from the White House of January 14.
Diving knowledge:
Developers selected to build on federal sites will be required to bring online enough clean energy generation resources to meet the electricity needs of their data centers, according to the release.
To support these efforts, DOE will take steps to promote distributed energy resources and support the safe and responsible deployment of nuclear power, among other actions.
Agencies will prioritize and dedicate staff to enable these projects in a timely manner, and DOD will immediately conduct environmental analyzes that will improve the speed and accuracy of future site-specific reviews, according to the order. Agencies will identify more opportunities to support expedited 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 environment
The order also aims to speed up the upgrading and development of transmission lines around these sites and facilitate the interconnection of AI infrastructure to the power grid.
“We will not let America get ahead of itself when it comes to the technology that will define the future, nor must we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water,” Biden said in the press release.
As companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence, the construction of new data centers has exploded. Current projects include a $1 billion Microsoft data center in Indiana, an $800 million Meta data center in Alabama, and a $630 million digital data center in northern Virginia.
To meet the high energy demands of these facilities, the technological giants are turning more and more to nuclear energy. This connection between data centers and nuclear power plants should continue to strengthen, said Gordon Dolven, director of data center research at CBRE, a Dallas-based commercial real estate services firm. he told Construction Dive in november
“That role is expected to grow, especially with advances like small modular reactors,” Dolven said. “[These] provide scalable and flexible solutions to support future energy needs.”
