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On Jan. 14, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing the departments of Defense and Energy to make land available for private entities to construct gigawatt-scale “frontier” AI data centers. He also instructed the Interior Department to identify sites on public land for developing “clean energy” to power those centers and called for streamlined permitting for the power projects and their associated transmission lines.
That same day, the Biden administration began the process of withdrawing more than 300,000 acres of public land from new mining claims and mineral leases in the Amargosa Valley in Nevada, protecting it from future lithium mining and geothermal energy development.
The two initiatives stand in stark contrast with each other. In one case, Biden offered corporate entities federal land for building energy- and water-intensive data centers as well as solar, wind, geothermal or even nuclear installations. In the other, he sought to protect federal land from similar energy developments.
With the Biden administration now behind us, we can see that this kind of inconsistency was the rule, not the exception, for his term. He nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, heightened drilling restrictions in the Arctic and leased out less land for oil and gas drilling than any president before him — and then turned around and approved Alaska’s Willow “carbon bomb” oil project and tossed out drilling permits in the Permian Basin like candy at a July Fourth parade. By establishing Ave Kwa Ame and Chuckwalla national monuments, he kept clean energy developers from exploiting those parts of the Mojave Desert, even as he green-lit dozens of massive solar and wind projects — not to mention lithium mines — on nearby land inhabited by Joshua trees and endangered desert tortoises.
I would argue that this apparent contradiction is deliberate, and that it echoes the strategy of the late Jimmy Carter. Both presidents protected vast swaths of public land and championed environmental initiatives. At the same time, they implicitly designated sacrifice zones by allowing and even encouraging the exploitation of some federal land, as if such a sacrifice was necessary to justify protecting the other places. Both politicians had the public interest at heart when they offered up public lands, with Carter striving for the ever-elusive goal of energy independence, while Biden clung to large-scale renewables as a solution to climate change.
Biden appeared to believe that facilitating data centers would achieve a greater good, pointing to AI’s “rapidly growing relevance to national security.”
Biden appeared to believe that facilitating data centers would achieve a greater good, pointing to AI’s “rapidly growing relevance to national security.” But tech companies don’t seem to need a “common good” argument to encourage their projects. After all, data centers have been sprouting on private land with minimal resistance for years, even in arid places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which together host at least 50 water-guzzling computer processor-packed warehouses. The centers are also popping up in the Northwest, where hydropower is plentiful, and in Wyoming, where less water and energy is needed to cool the equipment.
To his credit, Biden has acknowledged the outsized energy needs of these data centers. A single AI query uses about 10 times the power of a Google search, and even the old-school search engines aren’t exactly energy misers. The Edison Power Research Institute found that data centers currently consume more than 150 terrawatt-hours of electricity annually — enough to power hundreds of millions of homes — and by 2030 will gobble about 15% of the nation’s electricity supply.
This sudden growth in demand has utilities scrambling to keep up, delaying and even canceling the previously scheduled retirements of some coal and nuclear power plants while still racing to develop other energy sources. Tech giants like Meta and Amazon are buying up the entire generating capacity of utility-scale solar, wind and geothermal installations, and in some cases partnering with other entities to develop their own fleets of advanced nuclear reactors, all to feed the hungry AI beast.
Biden’s order aimed to put public lands on the menu, as long as the energy sources are “clean,” a category that includes solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal and nuclear — even natural gas and coal, as long as at least 90% of their carbon emissions are captured and sequestered. This means that, in theory, a corporation could build a gigawatt-scale data center powered by utility-scale “clean” power plants, or even coal-powered ones with carbon capture equipment, along with transmission lines, on federal lands, without having to go through the typical environmental review process.
Disposing of public land like this, no matter how noble the cause, sets a dangerous precedent.
Biden’s earlier, somewhat questionable moves — such as approving the Willow project — could be seen as cynical bids to garner oil industry support. The timing of this executive order, however, coming a mere week before he left political life for good, proves that his motives are sincere. AI is a powerful tool that has enormous potential for good, from diagnosing medical conditions to crunching huge datasets. It could also do tremendous harm, depending on who wields it. Biden did his best to at least mitigate the impacts of data centers’ energy use by requiring developers to build their own climate-friendly energy installations.
Yet disposing of public land like this, no matter how noble the cause, sets a dangerous precedent, especially given that the Trump administration will now decide who gets to build these projects and where, without the slightest concern for how “clean” they might be. Regardless of Biden’s good intentions and AI’s possible public benefit, the biggest beneficiaries here will be the corporate tech giants and their human masters, i.e. the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Bezoses and Altmans of the world.
These are the very same people Biden warned us about in his farewell speech, when he said: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” It’s a reminder that our public lands should serve as a buffer against oligarchy, not something to be exploited solely to nourish it.
