DOE selects four federal sites for AI datacenter buildout — Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Savannah River Site — implementing Section 3 of the July 23 EO

Opening

On July 24, 2025 — one day after Trump signed the datacenter permitting EO — the Department of Energy announced selection of four federal sites for AI-datacenter and co-located energy-generation development: Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and Savannah River Site. The announcement implements Section 3 of the EO, which directs Interior, Energy, and Defense to authorize Qualifying Project siting on federal lands.

What Happened / Key Facts

DOE’s announcement opened an industry-day / RFP solicitation process for private-sector partners to develop the four sites, with co-located power generation prioritized as natural gas, coal, nuclear, or geothermal. Each site brings specific capacity:

• Idaho National Laboratory — DOE had previously performed extensive site characterization and permitting activities for new nuclear reactors at INL’s National Reactor Innovation Center; site is positioned for SMR co-location
• Oak Ridge Reservation (Tennessee) — 500 kV transmission lines from TVA hydro, nuclear, and fossil generation; located approximately five miles from the proposed TVA Clinch River Small Modular Reactor site
• Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Kentucky) — 3,500-acre nuclear production site undergoing remediation; designed for up to 3 GW capacity in MISO power market
• Savannah River Site (South Carolina) — NNSA-managed; >3,100 acres developable land available, with DOE anticipating leasing 250-450 acres in initial tranche

Secretary Wright stated DOE had identified 16 federal sites total for “co-located data centers and energy infrastructure”; the July 24 announcement was the first tranche of four.

Why This Event Matters

This is the operational execution layer of the July 23 EO. Within 24 hours of the EO’s signing, the federal-land authorization mechanism in Section 3 produced concrete site selections — a pace that confirms inter-agency coordination predating the EO itself rather than triggered by it. The DOE solicitation cycle that followed used the EO’s NEPA categorical-exclusion framework (Section 5) to justify accelerated environmental review on what are, in three of the four cases, sites with significant historical contamination (Paducah’s gaseous-diffusion legacy; Savannah River’s nuclear-weapons-production legacy; Oak Ridge’s K-25 legacy).

The four-site selection is also significant for what it does NOT include: no Bureau of Land Management Western public land, no DoD installations, no Interior-administered surplus property. The federal-land authorization is being routed through DOE’s existing nuclear-and-Manhattan-Project real-estate portfolio, where decades-old environmental impact statements and operational permits provide regulatory cover that vacant federal land does not. This is the structural choice that lets the EO’s <50% federal-financial-assistance NEPA carve-out (Section 5(c)) operate on the buildout’s first sites without exposing the legal theory to litigation on pristine land — a friction-avoidance design choice.

The co-located power-generation preference for natural gas, coal, nuclear, or geothermal (notably excluding wind and solar, which face Interior Secretary Burgum’s personal-approval bottleneck per his July 17, 2025 Secretary’s Order) operationalizes the asymmetric energy policy: AI datacenters get federal land plus federal-process expedition; renewable competitors get a Secretary-level review hold.

Broader Context

The four sites are functionally a brownfield-datacenter pilot for the EPA’s Section 7(b) Brownfield/Superfund-reuse guidance (180-day deadline = mid-January 2026). The choice of contaminated DOE legacy sites — rather than pristine BLM land — confirms that the regulatory-design strategy is to leverage existing site-specific NEPA records and environmental permits rather than build new ones. The pattern was telegraphed in the EO’s Brownfield/Superfund directive: re-use what’s already permitted, exit what isn’t.

The Savannah River Site selection routes through NNSA — an unusual choice that brings national-security review authority into the datacenter-siting process. NNSA’s August 2025 follow-on RFP specified that SRS datacenter projects could leverage classified-information-handling infrastructure for federal national-security AI workloads, providing a national-security designation pathway under Section 2(d) of the EO that bypasses the 100 MW threshold entirely.

Research Gaps

• Identity of the private-sector partners that responded to each site’s RFP — likely surfaceable via DOE FOIA on the industry-day attendee lists
• Whether any of the four-site projects has actually completed environmental review and reached construction-start as of May 2026
• The other 12 federal sites in Wright’s “16 federal sites” total
• Cost-allocation: are the private partners taking <50% federal financing per Section 5(c), and how is that accounting being treated for sites where federal infrastructure (transmission, water, security) is provided in-kind?
• Connection between Savannah River’s NNSA classified-AI pathway and the Pentagon’s CDAO procurement architecture (Scale AI OTA expansion)

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