Brookfield and NextEra Energy have been selected to develop a $100 billion AI data center campus at the U.S. Department of Energy’s former Paducah gaseous-diffusion site in western Kentucky, with construction targeted for completion by 2031 and full buildout by 2032. The campus will draw up to 1.8 GW of utility capacity and 1.2 GW of compute load, paired with 4.6 GW of dedicated generation — 2 GW of natural gas and 2.6 GW of battery storage — that NextEra will own and operate while Brookfield develops the data centers themselves. The financing is structured under the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge so the project funds its own power infrastructure without shifting costs onto existing utility customers, subject to Kentucky Public Service Commission approval of the regional utilities’ service arrangements.
