NextEra and Brookfield are turning a Cold War uranium site into a $100 billion AI data center

Brookfield Asset Management and NextEra Energy are teaming with Big Rivers Electric Power, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative and Paducah Power System to build a $100 billion AI data center campus on a former uranium enrichment site in Paducah, Kentucky, targeting up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and 1.2 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2032. NextEra will build dedicated energy resources including 2 gigawatts of natural gas generation and up to 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage, with the project designed to avoid passing costs to residential ratepayers under the Trump administration's Ratepayer Protection Pledge.

Brookfield and NextEra Energy are putting a $100 billion AI campus on a former uranium enrichment site in Paducah, and the real story is the power plant being built beside it. There is a 3,556-acre site in McCracken County, Kentucky, that spent six decades enriching uranium. From 1952 until 2013, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was the last government-owned uranium enrichment facility in the United States. Now Brookfield and NextEra Energy want to turn it into one of the largest privately funded projects Kentucky has ever seen. The headline sounds like another AI data center announcement. It isn't. The constraint is power. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Brookfield Asset Management and NextEra Energy are teaming with Big Rivers Electric Power, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative and Paducah Power System on a $100 billion AI data center campus at the Energy Department site in western Kentucky. The companies are targeting up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and 1.2 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2032. NextEra is expected to build and own the dedicated energy resources: 2 gigawatts of natural gas generation and as much as 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage. Those numbers are the story. A 1.2 gigawatt compute load is not a warehouse full of servers with a power contract attached. It is a new industrial district built for AI, where the electricity system is part of the product from day one. That is a different kind of project entirely. If you still think the AI race is mostly about who gets Nvidia chips first, Paducah corrects you. The data center is only half the deal NextEra is not just selling electricity to a customer the way a utility sells to a mall. The structure is more integrated than that: NextEra is building dedicated generation and storage around the campus itself, with partners presenting the arrangement as consistent with the Trump administration's Ratepayer Protection Pledge. The White House pledge, announced in March 2026 and expanded in July, says data center developers and power providers should cover the generation, delivery and grid upgrades their facilities require, rather than passing those costs to ordinary households and small businesses. That is not a small distinction. Data centers have become a political problem because someone has to pay for the wires, substations and generation needed to serve them. Regulators and consumer advocates have already been pressing utilities over whether residential customers are being asked to subsidize massive new loads created by hyperscalers and AI developers. Paducah is designed to avoid that fight by tying the campus to dedicated power infrastructure. Look, that model will not fit every project. Some sites will still lean hard on the existing grid. Some developers will promise more dedicated power than they can build on time. But if Brookfield and NextEra can make this work, other utilities will copy the structure because it gives them a cleaner answer when ratepayers ask why their bills should rise for a server farm they will never see. NextEra has already been moving toward this role. In December 2025, the company announced a strategic energy and technology partnership with Google Cloud to scale multiple gigawatts of data center capacity and energy infrastructure across the United States. In May 2026, when NextEra and Dominion Energy announced their planned combination, they pointed to a large-load pipeline of more than 130 gigawatts. Paducah is the physical version of that investor pitch. Why Paducah makes sense The Energy Department did not pick Paducah by accident. In November 2025, DOE's Office of Environmental Management issued a Request for Offer seeking companies to build and power AI data centers on the former diffusion plant site. The agency described the land as one of four federal sites moving forward for AI infrastructure and energy generation projects, with applicants responsible for building, operating and decommissioning their projects and securing utility interconnection agreements. Former industrial land has what AI campuses need most: acreage, transmission history and a community already used to heavy infrastructure. Paducah has all three. It also has a federal landlord trying to turn a cleanup site into an economic asset. That is why a former Cold War uranium plant can suddenly look more useful to AI builders than another crowded parcel near Northern Virginia. The local jobs figure is large, too. The project is expected to create about 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent operational roles, according to reports on the announcement. That matters in western Kentucky because data centers often promise economic development while delivering relatively few long-term positions once construction crews leave. Six hundred permanent jobs is still not the same thing as a factory employing thousands, but it is more concrete than the usual vague talk about innovation districts. There are still hard questions. Natural gas generation at this scale will draw climate scrutiny. Battery storage helps manage load, but it does not erase fuel use. The 2032 build-out target also assumes AI demand remains strong enough to justify a campus whose price tag sits at $100 billion before all the usual delays, permitting fights and construction cost problems arrive. Still, Paducah tells you where the AI build-out is going. It is moving toward places where land can be assembled and power can be built before politics turns against you - and before the first server hall is full. The old uranium plant is not a strange backdrop for the AI economy. It is exactly the kind of place this economy now needs. Also read: GrubMarket files for IPO at $4.5 billion valuation as AI rewires the food supply chain https://startupfortune.com/grubmarket-files-for-ipo-at-45-billion-valuation-as-ai-rewires-the-food-supply-chain/ • Pangram raises $9M as Substack bets readers will pay for human writing https://startupfortune.com/pangram-raises-9m-as-substack-bets-readers-will-pay-for-human-writing/ • Google DeepMind disbanded its Nobel-prize-winning AlphaFold team and the talent went straight to Anthropic https://startupfortune.com/google-deepmind-disbanded-its-nobel-prize-winning-alphafold-team-and-the-talent-went-straight-to-anthropic/