Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
The Biden administration wants to find just the right place for your gigawatt-scale data center.
In an executive order announced Tuesday, President Biden empowered the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy (DOE) to lease land for AI infrastructure like giant data-storage facilities and clean-power sources.
The effort, according to the statement, will help to “prevent America from growing dependent on other countries to access powerful AI tools.”
Delete! The Washington Post reported in October how places like Fort Worth, Texas, and Fayette County, Georgia, have resisted the potentially loud, obstructive arrival of data centers, and local officials in areas like Northern Virginia and Atlanta have expressed concern about electricity and water demands imposed on infrastructure.
The White House said the DOD and DOE’s chosen locations for private-sector bids will be based on “accessibility to high-capacity transmission infrastructure and minimized adverse effects on communities, the natural environment, and commercial resources.”
Selected developers will also be required, under the directive, to deploy “sufficient” clean-energy generators to match electricity needs. (While the statement mentioned “small nuclear reactors” as one example, here’s a DOE list of clean-energy types.)
Developers will be required “to pay all costs of building and operating AI infrastructure so that this development does not raise electricity prices for consumers,” the statement said, and agencies will study data center impacts on electricity prices.
Costs: A May 2024 Goldman Sachs report concluded that data centers will consume 8% of US power by 2030—a 5% increase from 2022.
Microsoft recently shared plans to spend $80 billion in FY 2025 to “build out AI-enabled data centers to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” According to reports last fall, the tech giant also aims to use Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant.
While the executive order said capacity will be committed to small business and startups, David Brauchler, technical director and head of AI and ML Security at cybersecurity consulting firm NCC Group, believes that big, well-funded orgs are most likely to respond to the government’s proposal, possibly consolidating the AI market to a few major players.
“The organization likely to ‘win’ the most in this deal is Nvidia, who powers the training and inference processors used by AI systems,” Brauchler shared in an emailed statement. “They’ve already experienced their stock skyrocketing as demand for high-end AI hardware increases, and this deal is likely to contribute to their further growth.”