U.S. Department of Energy

“DOE seeks to enable the construction of AI infrastructure at select DOE sites to begin by the end of 2025, with a target of commencing operation by the end of 2027; in July 2025 DOE named Idaho National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge Reservation, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the Savannah River Site as the first four sites.”

U.S. Department of EnergyThought Leader

Cabinet department under Secretary Chris Wright; Request for Information on Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure on DOE Lands

The end-of-2027 operations target has not yet arrived, but the interim milestone slipped: DOE was still soliciting proposals with a January 30, 2026 deadline and only announced private-sector partnership agreements for Paducah and Savannah River in mid-2026.

“Blackouts could increase by 100 times in 2030 relative to today's averages if the U.S. continues to shutter reliable power plants and fails to add firm capacity: in the 'plant closures' scenario annual loss-of-load hours rise from 8.1 hours per year today to 817 hours — 'more than 800 hours per year' — with 104 GW of firm capacity set to retire by 2030 and an additional 100 GW of new peak-hour supply needed, 50 GW of it attributable to data centers.”

U.S. Department of EnergyResearcher

Cabinet department under Secretary Chris Wright; 'Report on Evaluating U.S. Grid Reliability and Security,' issued under Executive Order 14262

2030 is in the future, and the figure is a scenario-conditional modeling result (the 'plant closures' case); clean energy analysts have disputed the modeling assumptions.