A former Cold War uranium plant is about to become one of the biggest AI bets on the planet.
NextEra Energy and Brookfield just announced a $100 billion data center campus in Paducah, Kentucky — built literally on top of a shuttered nuclear enrichment site.
Yes, the same site that once enriched uranium for America's nuclear weapons program in 1952.
Now it's about to power something else entirely.
That's not a data center. That's a small country's power grid.
Brookfield owns and runs the campus.
NextEra — America's largest utility — builds the power behind it.
And a handful of local players — Big Rivers Electric, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, Paducah Power System — are along for the ride too.
Small-town Kentucky, meet Big Tech's electricity appetite.
AI's biggest bottleneck was never chips.
It was power.
The US grid is aging, demand is exploding, and every hyperscaler on Earth is scrambling for electrons.
So NextEra built this deal to fit the Trump administration's "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" — meaning the AI companies footing this bill pay above normal rates.
The goal? Your electric bill doesn't spike just because a chatbot needs to think faster.
Construction alone is expected to create around 8,000 jobs.
Another 600 permanent roles once it's humming.
Full completion target: 2032.
Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt called Paducah "the seed" of their $100 billion AI infrastructure plan — meaning this might just be chapter one.
A site once built to enrich uranium for war…
is now being repurposed to enrich something else entirely.
Intelligence.
That's all for now!
