Brookfield and NextEra Energy are reportedly planning a $100 billion data centre and energy complex at a former uranium enrichment site in Kentucky, as investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure accelerates across the United States. According to a report in the Financial Times, Canada’s Brookfield is teaming up with the US’s largest electric utility to build a massive data centre and energy complex on a former nuclear enrichment facility that played an important role in America’s nuclear weapons programme during the cold war.The project in Paducah, western Kentucky, will include 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired generation and 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage. The planned gas plants would have enough generating capacity to supply about 1.5 million homes.The US Department of Energy has agreed to lease more than 3,500 acres at the government-owned site, where uranium enrichment operations ended in 2013, according to a person familiar with the matter cited in the report. The facility played an important role in the US nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War. The privately financed campus is expected to begin operating in phases from 2028 and be completed by early 2032.
Silicon Valley’s ‘electricity promise’ to White House
Brookfield has begun discussions with major cloud computing companies about becoming anchor tenants at the site, according to a person close to the project. Brookfield chief executive Bruce Flatt reportedly said the development would serve as the starting point for the investment group’s plan to deploy $100 billion in AI infrastructure. “By advancing this project in line with the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge, we are ensuring innovation and affordability go hand in hand while creating high-quality jobs, attracting new investment and strengthening the local economy,” Flatt said, as per the report.Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out. The pledge, first announced in March this year, was initially signed by seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon. It will now cover companies delivering 80% of all power to US homes and businesses, according to the White House.“Electricity rates for 80% of the power distributed in America are now being kept in check by the plan,” Trump said at a press conference. Trump added that “radical left communists” are the ones who “want to shut down all new development, kill our most successful industries, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, and surrender the AI race to China”.Pledge comes at a time when more than a dozen states have considered moratoria on datacenters, and New York became the first US state to enact a temporary ban this month. Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative, have also proposed a national moratorium.
