Three former nuclear weapons sites are being reborn as AI data centers

The Department of Energy has done this three times in four months. In March 2026, the agency picked a private operator to convert the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. Earlier this month, it tapped Amentum to negotiate a lease for an AI data center at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This week, DOE named Brookfield Asset Management to develop a roughly $100 billion AI campus at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky, with its own natural gas and battery storage power plant on the same site (DOE announcement).

Three selections in four months share a template. Each time, the federal government takes cleaned-up Cold War real estate it already owns, hands it to a private operator, and seeds an AI compute campus with a behind-the-meter (built for the site, not the public grid) gas and battery plant to skip the multi-year queue for hooking up to the regional transmission grid. Paducah is the third instance, and the largest so far.

Paducah and Portsmouth are uranium enrichment plants, not nuclear reactors. They once separated fissile U-235 for weapons and power reactors and have spent decades in DOE's decontamination and decommissioning program. Savannah River produced tritium and plutonium for nuclear warheads. All three are federal land, already zoned for heavy industrial use, already connected to high-voltage transmission, and largely cleared of the worst contamination. AI compute needs exactly that profile: large, flat, electrified sites that a private developer can move onto fast.

Brookfield is not a contractor on the Paducah project. The firm is the operator. Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management runs more than $1 trillion in assets under management and has built out data center campuses in other markets. Under the selection, Brookfield will develop and operate the data center; NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility, and local Kentucky utilities are the power partners. A Brookfield spokesperson told trade press that discussions with commercial tenants for the data center space are ongoing, which makes the $100 billion figure a project envelope rather than a contracted capex line (Data Center Knowledge, BNN Bloomberg).

AI training runs need steady, gigawatt-scale power that the U.S. grid cannot always deliver on a hyperscaler's schedule. Building a new gas plant on the same footprint as the data center, and pairing it with batteries for ramping, lets a developer bypass the regional transmission organization entirely. Western Kentucky's grid is constrained; on-site generation sidesteps that bottleneck. It also means the local air-quality and climate footprint of the AI buildout is being routed to a specific rural valley, not spread across the regional grid.

Brookfield's own materials say roughly 30% of the announced $100 billion will go to construction of the data center buildings and the gas and battery plant. The other 70% is equipment: servers, networking gear, and accelerator chips. The ribbon-cutting will be a construction event. The capex is a chip order.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, on Fox & Friends, called the project "thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars of investment in rural western Kentucky" and said there will be "a lot of new natural gas power plants" (WCHS TV). The DOE press release says the work will help "ensure the United States wins the A.I. race." Whether the federal land transfer to a private operator, with on-site gas and an open tenant roster, delivers on that frame is the question the next announcements will answer.

The next three data points to watch: Brookfield's commercial-tenant lineup, the size and emissions profile of the on-site gas plant as filed with Kentucky state air regulators, and whether Amentum's Savannah River lease and the Portsmouth selection produce capex on the same template. Three sites in four months is a pattern. Five would be a trend.