The Trump administration identified 16 sites for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers Thursday on land owned by the Department of Energy.
The centers comprise rows of servers providing processing capacity for machine learning, cloud storage and AI systems that require massive amounts of electricity and computing power.
“The global race for AI dominance is the next Manhattan project, and with President Trump’s leadership and the innovation of our National Labs, the United States can and will win,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a Thursday statement.
“With today’s action, the Department of Energy is taking important steps to leverage our domestic resources to power the AI revolution, while continuing to deliver affordable, reliable and secure energy to the American people.”
The department said they hope to start operations at the center by the end of 2027, with input from data center developers, energy investors and the broader public.
The Energy Department said the effort was spurred on by two of the president’s executive orders, focusing the government’s resources on bolstering American AI and energy.
The new measures to develop data centers come after a Biden administration executive order intended to curb barriers to the construction of new data centers.
“Currently, the market for AI infrastructure is deeply constrained,” Navtej Dhillon, deputy director of former President Biden’s White House Economic Council, told reporters on a call in January.
“Not only are these investments capital intensive, but power constraints and powering challenges result in long lead times to bring data centers to market.”
During his first days back at the White House, Trump announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
Trump referenced the enormous power needs during an event on Jan. 21 announcing the investments from companies including SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.
“They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want,” Trump said.
