By Mark Jaffe | Colorado Sun
The Trump administration is looking to locate a private data center and power plant on land owned by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of a broader plan to site such facilities at 16 national laboratories.
“Private data center companies, that’s where the capital is, that’s where the investment is and on federal land, we make a commercial arrangement with them,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a press conference Thursday at NREL.
The arrangement could be a combination of lease payments and an allocation of data center computing to the lab. “It is using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said. “It helps the lab and helps the country by getting more data centers built.”
The underlying goal is to keep the U.S. in the forefront in the development of artificial intelligence. “We have a lot of land,” Wright said, “… and we want to win this AI race or at least stay in the lead.”
The plan builds on an order issued in the final days of the Biden administration to identify appropriate federal lands for the development of AI data centers and solicit project bids with the goal of having them operational by the end of 2027.