Amentum has been selected by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to enter negotiations for a phased lease to develop an integrated AI data center and on-site energy generation project at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.

If the lease is finalized, the public-private project would establish a 1 GW AI data center supported by about 2 GW of on-site energy generation. The initial power source is expected to be natural gas, with a transition to advanced nuclear energy described as the longer-term direction.

For data center engineers, the headline numbers matter: 1 GW of IT load is beyond conventional hyperscale campus sizing, and pairing it with roughly 2 GW of generation points to a build that’s planning for both capacity and operational headroom. But the key near-term technical question is how the phased lease structure translates into sequencing for generation, interconnect, and commissioning, because those gates tend to dictate when a site can actually take load.

“Artificial intelligence, energy resilience, and national security are becoming increasingly interconnected, creating new opportunities to strengthen America’s strategic advantage,” said John Heller, CEO of Amentum.

Mark Whitney, president of Amentum’s Energy & Environment business, said the effort would draw on the company’s “expertise in nuclear operations, infrastructure development, and program delivery” at SRS.

Amentum described the project as being designed to accelerate domestic AI computing capacity and expand reliable power generation at the site.

Source: Amentum