Project dossier · Paducah, Kentucky

Paducah Data Center Campus Proposed

1.8 GW campus on former DOE Paducah uranium-enrichment site; $100B+ private investment, 2 GW gas plant + 2.6 GW battery. NextEra building energy infra. ~600 permanent / 8,000 construction jobs. KY PSC approval pending. Completion target 2031.

Key facts

Operator
Brookfield
Size
1,800 MW
Location
Paducah, Kentucky
First proposed
2026-07-29
Stage today
Proposed

Source
read 2026-08-19

What to do next

Next step: Early stage. File a public-records request for the application and site plan.

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What has happened so far (1 event)

  • 2026-07-29announcement
    DOE announced Brookfield selected to develop 1.8 GW data center campus on the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant site; NextEra Energy building 2 GW gas plant + 2.6 GW battery storage. $100B+ private investment. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

  • Search Paducah planning filingssearchPlanning departments post application files under many different names. Find the department, then ask the clerk for the application number — that number unlocks everything else.
  • Search Paducah property records / GISsearchThe parcel record names the buying LLC and the sale date, which is what ties an anonymous filing to an operator.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 37.080, -88.600 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Kentucky

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Paducah Data Center Campus”, aigridwatch.com/projects/brookfield-paducah-ky, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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