Biden Releases AI Infrastructure Order in Final Week as President

“Cutting-edge AI will have profound implications for national security and enormous potential to improve Americans’ lives if harnessed responsibly, from helping cure disease to keeping communities safe by mitigating the effects of climate change,” Biden said. “However, we cannot take our lead for granted.”

The order directs DOD and the Department of Energy "to lease federal sites where the private sector can build frontier AI infrastructure at speed and scale." It also directs federal agencies to “prioritize full and expeditious permitting of AI infrastructure on federal sites” and facilitate the connection of AI infrastructure to the electricity grid. In addition, the order stresses the importance of using clean power.

"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,” Biden said.

"Renewed energy supplies and scalable data infrastructure form the bedrock of our American AI revolution,” Incompas CEO Chip Pickering said in a statement. “This plan charts a path forward on how we leverage our extraordinary resources effectively to power the homegrown builders of these technologies -- and compete in an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.”

AI has yet to live up to its potential in the telecom space, Ignacio Garcia, chief information officer at Vodafone Italy, said during the webinar Tuesday. “We have already seen that the opportunity is massive.”

With generative AI “another chapter opened,” Garcia said. “We see great opportunity to speak with customers in natural language in a way that we were never able to do, impacting the whole customer service operation,” he said. “We see very encouraging results,” but we’re still “in the infancy” of what AI can do. Garcia expects big changes in the next few years.

Carriers need to fully involve top executives in AI decisions “because you need to have a very clear strategy,” Garcia argued. Providers also need a flexible network architecture “because the technology is changing dramatically.”

There’s “clearly a lot of interest” among carriers in how they can make the best use of AI, said Adaora Okeleke, principal analyst at Analysys Mason. “We’re seeing that happen across the board, across different use cases,” she said. Operators and vendors are doing their own trials of AI “and the outcome is quite promising.” But she agreed the telecom industry has a way to go.

Telecom has gotten off to “a very solid start,” said Jon Penrose, head-telecom industry go-to-market strategy at AI cloud company Snowflake. “We’re making very good progress around AI, machine learning and, more recently, generative AI,” he said. “This is the very beginning of the journey, and we’re all learning together.” Most of the early telecom use cases Penrose sees are focused on network operations and process automation with a view to cutting costs.

“All major telcos have started implementing AI technology; however, they are at different stages of maturity -- from proofs of concept to deploying multiple AI use cases in scale,” ResearchAndMarkets.com said Tuesday in a report. “A clear strategy and roadmap articulation are critical in AI adoption,” it added. “Few telcos have architectures that support integrated enterprise data pools, including data gathered from real-time sources, indicating low data readiness to support AI applications.”