A coalition led by Brookfield and NextEra Energy has unveiled plans for a $100 billion, privately funded artificial intelligence data center campus at the U.S. Department of Energy's Paducah Site in Western Kentucky, one of the largest single AI infrastructure commitments to date.
The project, announced on July 29 and branded as the Paducah American Energy Hub, would pair the campus with up to 4.6 gigawatts of dedicated new power generation built and paid for solely to serve it. When fully built out in 2032, the site is expected to support up to 1.8 GW of utility capacity and more than 1.2 GW of compute load, according to the coalition. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
The Paducah Site once housed a government uranium-enrichment facility, and repurposing former federal energy land for AI compute has become a recurring theme as the industry scrambles to secure both land and electricity. Backing the venture are New York-based investment firm Brookfield, utility NextEra Energy, Big Rivers Electric Corporation — a member-owned generation and transmission cooperative serving 22 counties in Western Kentucky — and Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, a Paducah-based distribution cooperative with more than 23,000 consumer-members.
The scale underscores how the bottleneck for frontier AI is shifting from chips to power. By financing its own generation rather than competing for constrained grid capacity, the coalition aims to sidestep the multi-year interconnection delays that have stalled projects elsewhere.
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