Data Centers on Federal Land: EO 14318, DOE Sites, Army Bases and the Ratepayer Pledge

The federal government does not approve most data centers. Counties and cities zone them, state utility commissions set their power rates, and state agencies issue their air and water permits. The module Data Center Planning Issues walks that path. Federal policy matters where a project touches federal land, federal money, federal permits or a federal grid order. In July 2025 the White House set out to widen each of those doors.

EO 14318: what it actually changes

EO 14318, "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure," was signed July 23, 2025. It revokes Biden's EO 14141 of January 14, 2025, which had also offered DOE and Defense sites for AI data centers but tied them to clean power and labor terms. The new order keeps the federal land idea and drops those conditions.

Start with definitions. A "Data Center Project" needs more than 100 MW of new load dedicated to AI inference, training, simulation or synthetic data generation. "Covered Components" are the things such a project depends on: transmission lines, gas pipelines, substations, gas turbines, coal, nuclear and geothermal equipment, chips, networking gear and storage. A "Qualifying Project" is a data center or component project that meets any one of these: at least $500 million in committed capital spending, more than 100 MW of added load, a national security purpose, or designation by the Secretary of Defense, Interior, Commerce or Energy.

Then the operative sections:

Section	Directs	What it does not do
3	Commerce launches financial support: loans, guarantees, grants, tax incentives, offtake deals	Appropriate new money; it points to existing programs
5(a)-(b)	Agencies list existing NEPA categorical exclusions; CEQ coordinates new ones for data center work	Exempt projects from NEPA by itself
5(c)	Federal financial help under 50 percent of project cost is presumed not to be substantial federal control, so not a "major Federal action" under NEPA	Excuse a federal permit the project needs from review
6	Qualifying Projects can go on the FAST-41 permitting dashboard with expedited schedules	Guarantee approval
7	EPA to develop or modify rules under the Clean Air, Clean Water, Superfund and Toxic Substances laws, and to steer projects to brownfield and Superfund sites	Change any statute
8	Programmatic Endangered Species Act consultation for 10 years of common construction; Army Corps to consider a data center nationwide wetlands permit	Remove ESA duties
9	Interior and Energy offer sites on their land; Defense may competitively lease base land	Override state or local rules off federal land

The DOE sites, including Idaho National Laboratory

In July 2025 DOE named four sites for AI data centers paired with new power: Idaho National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said they were "uniquely positioned to host data centers as well as power generation." DOE said it would issue site solicitations and hoped to pick partners by late 2025. That timeline slipped.

Site	Status as reported by October 9, 2026
Savannah River, SC	NNSA picked Amentum in July 2026 to negotiate a phased lease: a data center starting at 1 GW, with 2 GW of on-site generation, gas first as a bridge to advanced nuclear (World Nuclear News)
Paducah, KY	DOE selected Brookfield on July 29, 2026 for a 1.8 GW AI campus with NextEra gas generation and batteries; the companies estimate $100 billion and operations from 2028 (GovConWire)
Oak Ridge, TN	Solicitation offers two parcels for long-term leases; no developer named
Idaho National Laboratory	Still open; no developer named

EO 14299, one of the May 2025 nuclear orders, ties in. Section 4 tells the Energy Secretary to start designating AI data centers at or coordinated with DOE facilities as critical defense facilities, and to site privately funded advanced reactors on DOE land to power AI, with a goal of the first one operating within 30 months, which is about November 2027. INL is the obvious candidate site for that pairing; its reactor history is in Idaho's Nuclear History.

Army land

On March 26, 2026 the Army announced conditional selections: Carlyle for about 1,384 acres at Fort Bliss, Texas, and CyrusOne (held by funds managed by KKR and BlackRock) for about 1,201 acres at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. The companies would finance, build, run and eventually decommission the centers "at no upfront cost to taxpayers," with first operation projected in fiscal 2027 at Fort Bliss and fiscal 2029 at Dugway. Lease terms, length and capacity were still under negotiation, with the Army Corps of Engineers handling the leases and environmental review.

BLM land: the quiet applications

DOE and Army sites get press releases. The Bureau of Land Management gets right-of-way applications, and those can sit unnoticed. The administration directed BLM to identify land suitable for data centers and the roads, pipelines and lines that serve them. On September 18, 2026, The Washington Sun reported, from BLM right-of-way records, that BLM was reviewing at least 12 data center and related proposals covering at least 17,600 acres in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming. Local officials told the Sun they had not known about many of them. Federal lands are managed for multiple uses; a data center on them has no real precedent.

State	What the Sun found (September 18, 2026)
Utah	Valar Atomics sought survey access to 10,200 acres near Green River for a data center with small reactors, then said after publication it would not pursue that site; a second proposal of unknown size remains
Arizona	Four related infrastructure proposals, together more than 3,000 acres
Idaho	Rhea Data, an Arevia Power subsidiary: 4 million square feet on 3,226 acres a few miles south of Boise, with gas generation and Idaho Power connections; another Arevia subsidiary seeks a right-of-way for related solar
Nevada	At least three proposals; one approved data center on public land is on hold after a legal challenge
Oregon	One Copia Power proposal
Wyoming	Prometheus Hyperscale applications for an access road, telecom line and water pipeline; Copia withdrew a separate proposal this summer

A BLM spokesperson told the Sun each project gets NEPA review so impacts are "understood, disclosed and appropriately addressed," and pointed to broadband and reliability benefits. Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities answered that the administration is cutting the public out of public land management, and Sierra Club Idaho's Lisa Young raised gas plants, longer coal use and water. Per the Sun, exact locations and sizes become public only when NEPA review begins, and most of these were still early. The Idaho roster, with the Rhea Data details from other reporting, is in Data Centers in Idaho: Built, Proposed and Stalled.

Who pays for the power: the January and March 2026 moves

The orders speed up siting. They say little about electric bills, which became the sharpest political problem. Two 2026 actions tried to answer it.

• January 16, 2026, PJM principles. Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, with governors including Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland, issued a statement of principles calling on PJM, the grid operator for 13 states, to hold an emergency procurement in which tech companies pay for new plants and residential customers are shielded from capacity price increases (CBS News). The administration said the National Energy Dominance Council had reached agreements with states on more than $15 billion in new generation.
• March 4, 2026, Ratepayer Protection Pledge. A presidential proclamation announced that seven companies, which Perkins Coie names as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI, pledged to "build, bring, or buy" new generation for their data centers, pay for the grid upgrades that serve them, negotiate separate rate structures, invest in host communities, and help with grid reliability. By July 2026 more than 200 organizations had signed on, according to GovConWire, and NextEra says its Paducah power plan fulfills the pledge.

The pledge is voluntary. No statute or rule enforces it. Whether it holds depends on state utility commissions writing it into tariffs and contracts, which is where the lessons The Grid and Who Pays and Ratepayer Protections at the Utility Commission pick up.

The arguments

The administration's case: federal sites already have security, land and in some cases power and transmission; permitting delays cost years; and AI capacity is a national security race. The Army's announcement adds that private financing means no upfront taxpayer cost.

The skeptical case comes in several forms. Environmental groups object to new categorical exclusions and the 50 percent presumption because they reduce public review. Ratepayer advocates point out that siting help does nothing for bills unless commissions enforce cost rules. And Jeff Pierson, writing on this site's Substack in "The Machine Comes to the Magic Valley," argues that developers find federal sites less attractive than rural private land. On a base they compete with the base for power and water and answer to federal security and supply-chain rules. Off base they can plug into a utility with cheap power and spread grid costs onto captive ratepayers. So the real buildout goes where power is cheap and oversight is lightest. The slow pace at INL and Oak Ridge is consistent with that argument, though it does not prove it; solicitations take time for many reasons.