The federal government is handing one of the Cold War’s most contaminated industrial sites a second life as an AI factory. On July 29 the Department of Energy unveiled plans for a data center campus backed by more than $100 billion in private investment on part of its former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky. It would rank among the largest such projects ever proposed in the country.
Who’s building it, and how it gets powered
Brookfield will develop and operate the campus. NextEra Energy will build and own the power that feeds it, roughly 4.6 gigawatts of new generation. When the site is fully built out around 2032, DOE expects it to support up to 1.8 GW of utility capacity and more than 1.2 GW of compute load across a 3,556-acre footprint. Big Rivers Electric, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, and Paducah Power System round out the coalition. The agency puts the labor at about 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent roles. The full plan is captured in the new Exchange listing for the Paducah AI Data Center Campus.
Why a nuclear brownfield beats a cornfield
The Paducah plant enriched uranium for weapons, then for reactor fuel, starting in 1952, and it has sat as a cleanup liability for decades. Reusing it solves two problems at once. It puts a grid-connected industrial brownfield back to work, and it dodges the local opposition that greenfield data centers keep running into. The land already carries transmission, water rights, and a workforce that knows heavy industry.
Power is the real headline. Bolting 4.6 GW of purpose-built generation to the campus is a plain admission that the existing grid can’t take loads this size on its own. That’s the pattern to watch. Federal sites with old infrastructure and few neighbors are about to look very attractive to developers who need gigawatts and can’t wait a decade for an interconnection. Paducah won’t be the last.