The executive order that lets big data centers skip the usual federal review
Executive Order 14318, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure, directs federal agencies to speed approvals for data centers adding more than 100 megawatts of load or costing at least 500 million dollars. It tells agencies to find and create categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act, and directs Interior and Energy to offer federal sites while Defense may competitively lease military land.
How the public reaches this
An executive order takes no public comment. Its effect is to remove review steps that would otherwise have carried one, so the room this closes is the environmental review a project would have had.
Timeline
Sources
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How this decision moved
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2026-08-06 Tracked, with the number corrected. A reader asked for Executive Order 14314; that order is Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks, and it raises national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The order that governs data center permitting is 14318, signed July 23rd, 2025. Its Alaska relevance is direct, because it instructs the Defense Department that it may competitively lease military land for qualifying projects, which is the authority underneath the Air Force offer of about 4,700 acres at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, Eielson and Clear that this docket already tracks. A categorical exclusion means a project is presumed to have no significant environmental effect and skips the study that would otherwise be written, so the order's practical effect in Alaska is fewer published environmental findings on the largest power users the state has ever considered.
Cite this
Alaska AI Docket, The executive order that lets big data centers skip the usual federal review.
Tracked since August 6, 2026, last verified
August 6, 2026. https://alaskaaihq.com/docket/eo-14318-data-center-permitting/ · Reuse permitted under
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