Trump greenlights AI data center at Colorado’s NREL to ‘win the AI race’
By Mark Jaffe | Colorado Sun
The Trump administration is looking to locate a private data center and power plant on land owned by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of a broader plan to site such facilities at 16 national laboratories.
“Private data center companies, that’s where the capital is, that’s where the investment is and on federal land, we make a commercial arrangement with them,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a press conference Thursday at NREL.
The arrangement could be a combination of lease payments and an allocation of data center computing to the lab. “It is using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said. “It helps the lab and helps the country by getting more data centers built.”
The underlying goal is to ke...