A gargantuan data centre plan that could be named after Donald Trump looks set to embody the president’s vision of US energy – a heavy stress on nuclear and gas, with green power more at the margins.
The plan, for which no price tag is specified, aims to help satisfy soaring demand created by AI and other advanced data centre operations, identified as a key priority by Trump when he returned to office.
Precise details of the generation sources to be tapped are still sketchy – but its heavy reliance on nuclear and gas is spelled out plainly, as is its ambition to meet the President’s demand for “global energy and AI dominance”.
The project, which Fermi America is officially calling its HyperGrid campus, will be “the world’s largest energy-driven AI complex” according to the company.
“The Chinese are building 22 nuclear reactors today to power the future of AI,” said Perry in a statement. “America has none. We’re behind, and it’s all hands on deck.”
Fermi America has applied for expedited consent to build four 1GW Westinghouse nuclear reactors, according to the Washington Post.
The data centre campus near Amarillo will also tap “the nation’s biggest combined-cycle natural gas project” that is “strategically situated at the confluence of several of the nation’s largest gas pipelines and located atop one of the nation’s largest known natural gas fields”, the company itself said.
Fermi America does also flag a role for solar and battery storage in its giant co-location strategy. Wind – the renewable source against which Trump has waged a bitter campaign for a decade or more – does not feature on the roster on Fermi America’s website, although presumably plays a part under what is described as “utility grid power” in a state that ranks among the world’s wind power hotspots.
The developer – which will apparently give more details of the project on 4 July – aims to have 1GW of power online by 2026 and believes it can get the nuclear component into service as soon as 2032, a schedule that has already been labelled ambitious by some commentators.
The project – to be advanced in conjunction with Texas Tech University System – is far from the only huge US AI data centre initiative to put gas or nuclear rather than renewables at the heart of their plans.
The once-notorious Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania is being brought back into service to help meet Microsoft’s AI needs, for example, while a number of data centre projects or the utilities to serve them have said gas forms the bedrock of their supplies.
