Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is complaining that the Trump administration failed to inform him of its plans for a $100 billion data center campus on federal land in his state.
The proposed Paducah American Energy Hub is slated to be built on a 3,500-acre Department of Energy site that enriched uranium during the Cold War. The $100 billion privately funded project is slated to be fully constructed in 2032, will support up to 1.8 gigawatts (GW) of utility capacity and over 1.2 GW of compute capacity — backed by up to 4.6 GW of dedicated generation resources paid for and built specifically for the project.
Politico reports Beshear, a Democrat who is reportedly considering a presidential run in 2028, said no one from the White House or Department of Energy contacted him about the specific plans for a data. He added that neither NextEra Energy nor Brookfield Asset Management, the energy and financial companies funding the project, clued him into what was coming.
“I was not briefed on it,” Beshear said. “I had gotten notice that there would be an announcement and that it was a data center announcement. But at no point did the companies come and talk about the scope, the power demands, how they were going to be met, designs that could reduce or eliminate — hopefully — environmental issues. Those are the types of things that we want to talk through with any data center project.”
Last week, Beshear signed an executive order that set basic standards for data centers and directed utility regulators to ensure state residents don’t see a spike in their electric bills from these facilities. The executive order requires data center developers to issue an energy plan to state agencies that regulate energy and the environment.
Beshear added that he didn’t have enough information about the new project to give an opinion on its viability. But he insisted that local residents in the area around the data center need to know what is going on.
“I don’t believe that the federal government or the state government should be the end-all ‘yes’ to a data center or should be the end-all ‘no,’” the governor said. “This is a very local decision, and it should be made by localities, but within certain parameters — with the right guardrails.”
A Department of Energy spokesperson released a statement claiming Beshear was not out of the loop.
“The Energy Department provided notifications to members of the Governor’s office the week prior to the announcement and again the week of the announcement. This is standard practice,” the statement said.
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