PORTS Technology Campus

PORTS campus

A 10 GW Campus on a Former Uranium Enrichment Site

• Site: the DOE Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, a former gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant. It was among the 16 candidate sites DOE listed in April 2025 but not among the four picked in July; it advanced separately in March 2026.
• Developer: SB Energy, a SoftBank company, with AEP Ohio as utility partner. The first phase covers 189 acres.
• Power: up to 10 GW of new generation, 9.2 GW of it gas. Financing named so far: $4.2B for transmission and $33.3B of Japanese funding for the gas plants.
• Status: ground broken March 20, 2026, with about 10,000 construction jobs and more than 2,000 permanent jobs projected.

See Onsite Gas.

All federal sites

Three DOE Sites Have Developers; Two Have None a Year Later

• DOE, developer named
• DOE, no award
• Military land

Lease terms

Developers Pay for Everything, Including the Power Plant

DOE leases its sites "as is, where is." The developer designs, finances, permits, builds, runs and eventually removes the data center, and new generation must be part of the project; DOE said it prefers nuclear or geothermal. DOE expected six to 18 months of development, one to two years of construction and at least 10 years of operation. Rents and terms are negotiated after award and none has been published. Army sites use enhanced use leases with no upfront cost to taxpayers.

Executive orders

Permitting Shortcuts for Projects Over 100 MW

• EO 14141 (January 2025): directed DOE and the Defense Department to lease federal sites for AI data centers with clean power. Revoked by EO 14318.
• EO 14318, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure (July 2025): covers projects with more than 100 MW of new AI load or at least $500M of capital spending. It orders new categorical exclusions from environmental review, treats federal funding below 50% of cost as not a "major federal action," and directs agencies to offer leases on their sites.

Genesis Mission

Genesis Puts AI to Work Across All 17 National Labs

• Order: EO 14363, November 24, 2025, launched an AI platform for science across the 17 national labs, aiming to double US research productivity within a decade.
• Partners: 24 organizations signed on in December 2025, including Nvidia, AMD, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, SpaceXSI, HPE, Dell, IBM, Intel, Cerebras, Groq, CoreWeave and Palantir.
• Funding: $320M+ across four initiatives in December 2025, including $150M for an American Science Cloud. At the first Genesis summit in July 2026, partners committed more than $800M.
• Compute: half of Oak Ridge's new Lux AI cluster goes to Genesis work. See Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Obstacles

Gas Instead of Nuclear, Contaminated Land, Slipping Dates

• Fuel: Portsmouth's power is mostly gas, Paducah's plan names gas and batteries, and Savannah River starts on gas, against DOE's stated preference for nuclear and geothermal.
• Contamination: cleanup at Paducah runs to 2065 at about $17B; the Kentucky Resources Council wants close oversight of building on and pumping water from the site.
• Local opposition: a Paducah group says no study covers the effect on a river supplying about 5 million people downstream; Ohio residents filed a petition for a constitutional ban on mega data centers.
• Schedule: DOE targeted ground broken by the end of 2025 and operation by the end of 2027; Idaho and Oak Ridge have no award a year after bids closed.
• Congress: a House bill, H.R. 9939, would bar AI data centers on federal land, including military bases.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• TACC Horizon
• Onsite Gas
• Reshoring and Sovereignty