Hanford Nuclear Reservation with Northwest Energy’s nuclear reactor letting off steam in the background. (Photo by Tobin, via Flickr, Creative Commons)President Joe Biden this week issued one of his last executive orders, addressing the race to build domestic data centers and clean energy plants in order to retain America’s leadership in artificial intelligence. “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,” the order states. The nation’s tech behemoths — including Seattle-area cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon — are sprinting to expand the computing power of their own AI operations and those of their cloud customers. But shortages of suitable land and clean energy are challenging these efforts.Biden’s order directs 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” and highlights the essential role that AI plays in the economy and national security.“As the land of liberty, America — not China — must lead the world in the development of AI,” Biden said in his farewell address to the nation on Wednesday evening. The executive order calls on federal agencies to identify tracts for data centers and clean energy plants, and to work quickly in permitting the projects

Sustainability: News about the rapidly growing climate tech sector and other areas of innovation to protect our planet. SEE MOREAn Amazon data center in Oregon. (AWS Photo)Artificial intelligence and the data centers that drive the technology are booming with no end in sight. That’s putting mounting pressure on tech giants to come up with climate friendly ways to power all that AI computing.A new Department of Energy report tracking data center power use found that it increased 7% from 2014 to 2018 and then jumped 18% between 2018 and 2023. Looking ahead, the demand is expected to increase between 13% to 27% from 2023 to 2028.The computer-packed sites pose a specific challenge in that they need reliable power 24/7 and it needs to be clean to fulfill tech company pledges to eliminate their carbon emissions. And yet the DOE predicted that data centers could gobble up to 12% of the total U.S