Paducah's former nuclear cleanup site lands a $100B AI campus and its own power plant

Paducah, Kentucky is about to swap identities. A federal site that spent three decades cleaning up Cold War uranium enrichment is being redeveloped into one of the largest artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing campuses in the country, complete with its own 2-gigawatt gas-fired power plant and up to 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage, under a partnership the U.S. Department of Energy announced Wednesday.

The mechanism underneath is the inversion of who builds the power. Brookfield will develop and operate the 1.8-gigawatt data center campus, while NextEra Energy will build and own the dedicated generation and storage sitting next to it. The combined 4.6 gigawatts of new power and batteries is sized to exceed what the campus draws, with DOE framing the surplus as a buffer for the regional grid. Instead of an AI campus leaning on the local utility, the campus brings its own utility, and the leftover kilowatt-hours are the bargaining chip.

DOE's framing is that the surplus will lower rates for nearby residents and businesses. Energy Secretary Chris Wright tied the project to President Donald Trump's "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," and DOE's release says the project is designed to protect ratepayers from rising energy costs. Whether that framing survives depends on the Kentucky Public Service Commission, which has to approve the power service agreement that ties the campus to Big Rivers Electric Power Corporation's wholesale service, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative's retail service, and Paducah Power System as a community partner. Until that ruling, "ratepayer protection" is the department's pitch, not a regulatory finding.

The headline number is a more than $100 billion private-investment projection attributed by DOE to the project. Private capital announcements at this scale are usually aspirational rather than committed, and DOE has not yet published a project finance breakdown. The number sets the ceiling; the capex schedule and the 2031 completion target will determine what actually gets built. Construction is expected to employ about 8,000 workers, with 600 permanent jobs once the campus is live, per the Energy Department. That mix leans heavy on the build phase and light on the long tail, a familiar shape for hyperscale builds.

The Paducah Site is a former federal uranium-enrichment facility in western Kentucky, under environmental cleanup since the 1990s. Reusing it lets DOE thread a federal-state-coordinated siting path that greenfield projects can't easily match: large contiguous footprint, existing transmission corridors, a known environmental baseline, and a workforce already trained to handle regulated nuclear material. The project is the first major siting under DOE's "American Energy Hubs" initiative, the department's label for converting former federal sites into energy, manufacturing, and technology hubs while cleanup continues. That framing is policy positioning, and the operational details of cleanup coordination, siting cost, and who absorbs overruns have not been released.

In Kentucky, U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, whose district includes Paducah, called the investment "historic" and credited advocacy alongside Heartland and Kentucky officials. Wright echoed the ratepayer frame, and DOE staged the announcement as a model for how the federal government can pair private capital with a retired federal asset.

Three open questions will determine what gets built. Kentucky's PSC has to sign off on the power service agreement. Environmental cleanup and transmission upgrades can push the 2031 completion target. A $100 billion private capex projection is not a contract. The dedicated-power template also leaves a regulatory question: whether the surplus actually reaches the regional grid depends on the campus running below its nameplate and the utility dispatching the excess where it is needed, and that record for pre-paid on-site generation is mixed.

DOE's Wednesday announcement is the first federal siting of a former cleanup site for hyperscale AI at this scale with a paired utility partner. The next concrete beat is the Kentucky PSC docket. Until then, the package on the table is a $100 billion projection, a 4.6-gigawatt dedicated-power buildout, and a department promise that the leftover electrons will go somewhere useful.