U.S. puts gigawatt AI campuses on federal land to lock in compute lead

The U.S. Department of Energy is converting former nuclear plants and national laboratory land into gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence campuses, pairing the sites with dedicated power plants in a federal siting drive meant to keep most of the world’s AI computing capacity inside the United States. Officials present the program as a way to win what Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called the next Manhattan Project, using public land to speed construction that private developers increasingly struggle to permit locally.