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.

The executive order calls on the federal departments of Defense and Energy to each identify at least three locations for private-sector data centers. It seeks to balance construction, consumer cost and environmental impact.

The rapid growth and huge electricity needs spawned by the artificial intelligence revolution spurs a directive to lease federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments for power supply centers.

Amid a lot of gen AI hype, managing the increasing energy needs of data centers will in part come down to not using gen AI for everything.

The UK is planning special districts for constructing data centers and will explore dedicating nuclear energy to the sites as part of a Labour government project to boost technology growth and the ecosystem for artificial intelligence.