Biden signs executive order on AI infrastructure on federal land

Six days before leaving office, President Biden signed an executive order directing the Departments of Defense and Energy to lease selected federal sites to private developers for the construction of “frontier AI” data centres and the clean-power generation needed to run them. Winning bidders, chosen through a solicitation process, would have had to begin construction by 1 January 2026 and reach full operating capacity by the end of 2027, procuring new zero- or low-carbon generation — geothermal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric or marine — to match the load. The order also directed the Interior Department to designate at least five “Priority Geothermal Zones” eligible for expedited permitting.

The order framed the goal in competitive terms: keeping frontier AI development and the compute it depends on inside the United States rather than dependent on, or ceded to, other countries, while directing that the power procured be genuinely additional generation rather than diverted from the existing grid.

It did not survive long as active policy. Unlike Biden’s broader October 2023 AI executive order, which Trump revoked on his first day back in office, this infrastructure order remained formally in effect for several months before Trump’s administration issued its own “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” order in late July 2025, which superseded it — retaining the broad goal of fast-tracked federal-land data centre development while replacing Biden’s specific leasing and clean-energy procurement mechanism with the incoming administration’s own framework.