Trump Administration Offers Federal Land to Data Center Projects 👉 Updatem News

Department of Energy’s call for ‘co-locating energy sources with data centers’ lists 16 federal sites ’uniquely positioned for rapid data center construction.’

Data center developers with shovel-ready projects that can be operating before 2028 have until May 7 to respond to the Trump administration’s call for locating on sites within Department of Energy properties.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said offering data center co-location leases near, or on, department lands is a genesis of President Donald Trump’s whole-of-government National Energy Emergency declaration and his Jan. 23 ‘Removing Barriers To American Leadership In Artificial Intelligence’ executive order.

The department’s laboratories and lands will play key roles in growing the electric grid to ensure the nation remains on the cutting edge of advancements in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, developments that will define 21st century economies, he said in an April 3 announcement.

Much is at stake, Wright said, because unless the United States can rapidly boot-up its capacity to generate and transmit electricity, it will “lose the AI race to China.”

The department’s Request for information offers developers sites on properties “uniquely positioned for rapid data center construction, including in-place energy infrastructure with the ability to fast-track permitting for new energy generation such as nuclear.”

Among the 16 properties are two defunct uranium gaseous diffusion plants and sites on national laboratories lands, including on Oak Ridge in Tennessee and on Los Alamos in New Mexico, key World War II technology hubs that produced the first atomic bombs.

“The global race for AI dominance is the next ‘Manhattan Project’ and, with President Trump’s leadership and the innovation of our national labs, the United States can and will win,” Wright said.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation nearly tripled its nine-year electricity growth-demand projections from previous forecasts in 2023, a shock wave that rippled through transmission operators and utilities that manage a grid largely unprepared for such a surge.

Large commercial and industrial “loads,” including data centers, bitcoin mines, and supercomputers, will fuel this surge, the forecast said, although wide-scale digitalization—the average home has 21 devices—is also contributing.

A December 2024 Department of Energy report projected that data center energy demand will triple by 2028, a trend already underway, according to CBRE’s North America Data Center Trends H2 2024 report, which documents more than double the data centers were under construction in December 2024 than in December 2023.

The Dodge Construction Network said new buildings to house information technologies, such as data centers, constitute the fastest-growing segment of nonresidential construction planning, increasing by 20 percent in 2024.

J.P. Morgan told Reuters that spending on data centers could add between 10 to 20 basis points to U.S. economic growth in 2025 and 2026.

But first, they’ll need to plug in to power up.

Executives with several national regional transmission operators told a Senate panel on March 25 they’re uncertain they’ll be able to generate the electricity these new data centers will need by 2028 without creating shortages and higher bills for existing customers.

The shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant stands in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Pa., on Oct. 10, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) — The shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant stands in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Pa., on Oct. 10, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Powering Up

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in February launched a review of issues related to co-locating large loads such as data centers at power plants—a solution that some data center developers have been pushing for several years with nuclear the preferred energy source.

PJM Interconnect, Talen Energy, Constellation Energy, and PSEG Power are among transmission operators and energy companies considering proposals to have data centers built on, or near, nuclear power plants.

Examples include Amazon’s $650 million proposal to build a data center next to Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pennsylvania, and Constellation Energy partnering with Microsoft to reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, more than 40 years after one of its reactors partially melted down.

But many developers are considering bringing their own power in data center proposals before local and state planning boards. Big tech companies were on pace to pour more than $180 billion into data center expansions and related infrastructure costs last year, according to Dell’Oro Group.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle, and OpenAI, among others, plan to spend billions on developing data centers fueled by small nuclear reactors that could be installed in plants to generate their own electricity.

Microsoft and Oracle—which has designed three small reactors—are among developers poised to provide their own nuclear energy sources.

Amazon, which opened its first data centers in Ohio in 2016, plans to invest $148 billion by 2040 to beef up its artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure. In December 2024, it announced a $10 billion plan to further expand its cloud computing in the state, including a groundbreaking for a 200-acre, $2 billion data center in Sunbury.

After building its 750,000-foot, $600 million data center in Arizona in 2023, Google is spending nearly $6.5 billion on data centers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska.

The company is building data centers in Jeffersonville, Indiana; Rosemont, Minnesota; Montgomery, Alabama; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and Aiken, South Carolina.

“AI promises to drive innovation and boost productivity in every sector of the economy,” Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith said in a Jan. 3 post. “The United States is poised to stand at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if it doubles down on its strengths and effectively partners internationally.”

Oracle, which Data Center Frontier documents owns and operates 160 public and private data centers, announced in September that it is working on a proposed data center that will be powered by three small nuclear reactors. The firm is building an “AI-focused” data center in Salt Lake City that is so large that eight Boeing 747s would fit nose-to-tail inside it.

An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va., on July 17, 2024. (Nathan Howard via Getty Images) — An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va., on July 17, 2024. Nathan Howard via Getty Images

Make A Deal

Among proposed data center developments that could be Department of Energy tenants is Stargate, a $100 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle to build 10 data centers—each at least spanning 500,000 square feet—that Trump referenced on his third day in office.

“Beginning immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” he said in the Oval Office. “This will include the construction of colossal data centers—very, very massive structures.”

Trump pledged to trim permitting and shorten timelines to boost Stargate.

“I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built,” he said. “So, they have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily, at their own plants if they want. They’ll build energy generation.”

Other department properties being offered for data development include land on the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina, and on 380 acres within the 25-square-mile Pantex Plant north of Amarillo, Texas, where nuclear weapons are assembled and disassembled.

The list includes 110 acres within the 6,800-acre Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which already operates one of the federal government’s largest data centers as one of five National Quantum Initiative Centers, and Brookhaven National Laboratory on the east end of New York’s Long Island, where 90 acres are available in its public-private BNL Discovery Park District.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, has the capacity to accommodate a large data center “as soon as this year,” according to the request, while Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago could accommodate a massive 1,518-acre “data park” fully operating by 2028.

The department has 88 acres within Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s 825-acre Forrestal Campus, and its National Energy Technology Laboratory research and technology hubs are offering 45 acres in Morgantown, West Virginia, and 50 in Pittsburgh.

At least five national laboratories are offering co-location sites for data center developers, including on 62,000 acres within 890-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory; 562 acres on Oak Ridge National Laboratory, less than five miles from the pending Tennessee Valley Authority Clinch River small modular reactor demonstration; 295 acres on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington; and 40 acres adjacent to a power substation on Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Original News Source Link – Epoch Times

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