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 keep the U.S. in the forefront in the development of artificial intelligence. “We have a lot of land,” Wright said, “… and we want to win this AI race or at least stay in the lead.”

The plan builds on an order issued in the final days of the Biden administration to identify appropriate federal lands for the development of AI data centers and solicit project bids with the goal of having them operational by the end of 2027.

Wright said that there has been public pushback on data centers out of concerns customers will have to foot the bill for power plants, but the plan would be for electricity generation to be colocated with the data center.

“If you need 100 units of electricity, we want you to build 110, so you build the increment of power you use and are additive to the grid,” Wright said.

The data center is proposed for NREL’s Flatirons Campus, which includes the National Wind Technology Center, located along Colorado 128 southwest of Superior. The lab is constructing a new building there to monitor and control energy systems on the campus while also communicating with researchers at universities and other government institutions.

The U.S. Department of Energy is issuing a request for information from data center developers, energy developers and the public.

“The information collected will be used to inform development, encourage private-public partnerships and enable the construction of AI infrastructure at select DOE sites with a target of commencing operation by the end of 2027,” the DOE said this week.

Among the other sites proposed are the National Energy Technology Laboratory near Pittsburgh, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

In future solicitations, DOE said it would provide additional information such as acreage, access to water, environmental sensitivities, land use plans, hazards, and power access and energy infrastructure.

The “next energy-intensive manufacturing industry” is AI, Wright said. “This is an enormous amount of energy in its highest and most expensive form to manufacture intelligence.”

“The global race for AI dominance is the next Manhattan Project,” Wright said.

Wright, CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy, was confirmed as energy secretary, in February, with Colorado’s U.S. Senators, both Democrats, voting in favor.