A $100bn AI campus on a Cold War uranium site — 2GW of gas, 2.6GW of batteries
NextEra and Brookfield will develop a $100 billion data centre campus at the Department of Energy's Paducah site in western Kentucky, a former uranium enrichment facility that stopped operating in 2013. The plan pairs 1.8 gigawatts of compute with a 2-gigawatt gas plant and up to 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage. Completion is targeted for 2031.
The site choice is the engineering decision, not the real-estate one. Paducah retains industrial-scale water infrastructure, heavy transmission and dense fibre from its enrichment years. Those are precisely the three things that take longest to permit and build from scratch, which is why a decommissioned nuclear facility compresses a timeline that greenfield sites cannot.
Building 2 gigawatts of gas generation alongside is the admission worth noting. The grid could not supply this on the required schedule, so the project brings its own. Behind-the-meter generation keeps appearing in these filings for the same reason every time: interconnection queues run on decade clocks and model generations run on months.
The 2031 completion date is also the honest part of the announcement. Eight thousand construction jobs and roughly six hundred permanent ones, over five years. That is an infrastructure project timeline, and it sits oddly against the eighteen-month planning horizons the customers of this capacity operate on.
Bloomberg — NextEra, Brookfield to build $100 billion Kentucky data campus → · Quartz — NextEra and Brookfield are building a $100 billion AI data center campus on a Cold War uranium site → · Daily Energy Insider — NextEra, Brookfield lead $100B plan for AI data center campus at former Kentucky nuclear site →