AI Power Weekly News Roundup 3/30

This week: a 10-gigawatt data center on a Cold War nuclear site, nearly a billion dollars paid out to dismantle offshore wind, and more

Mar 30, 2026

SoftBank and DOE Announce 10 GW Data Center Campus on Former Ohio Uranium Site

The Department of Energy, SoftBank, and AEP Ohio announced a public-private partnership to build a 10-gigawatt data center campus at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility now owned by the federal government. SB Energy, SoftBank’s energy arm, will build 9.2 GW of new natural gas generation to power the campus, while SoftBank is investing $4.2 billion with AEP Ohio to build and upgrade transmission lines across southern Ohio.

At full buildout, 10 GW would be more than half the total operating capacity of every existing U.S. data center combined. The project is part of Japan’s $550 billion U.S. investment commitment made during tariff negotiations with the Trump administration.

The Portsmouth site is a genuinely clever move. The federal land is already cleared, the Cold War infrastructure footprint means transmission access exists, and the symbolic resonance of powering AI on a former nuclear weapons site is not lost on this administration. The natural gas-heavy power plan will draw fire from clean energy advocates, but the scale signals the federal government is treating AI infrastructure as a national priority on par with the original Manhattan Project facilities.

Watch for state regulators and environmental groups in Ohio challenging the gas generation buildout, and how this competes with existing PJM interconnection queue projects for equipment and contractors. (DOE)

Trump Administration Pays TotalEnergies $928 Million to Exit Offshore Wind

The Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies signed agreements March 23 to relinquish two offshore wind lease areas, including the Carolina Long Bay lease with roughly 1,300 MW of potential capacity off the North Carolina coast. The government will reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million in lease fees paid in 2022, dollar for dollar, on the condition TotalEnergies invest that amount in U.S. oil, gas, and LNG projects including Rio Grande LNG in Texas. TotalEnergies pledged not to pursue any new offshore wind projects in the United States. This sets a precedent every other offshore wind leaseholder is watching closely, and the loss of 1,300 MW off the Carolinas forces grid planners to rethink Southeast coastal power planning. (Utility Dive)

Seven Hyperscalers Sign White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge in early March, committing to fund all new power generation and grid infrastructure required by their data centers at no cost to residential electricity customers. Signatories must negotiate separate rate structures directly with utilities and pay those rates whether they consume the electricity or not, and must make backup generation available to grid operators during emergencies. This is the first formal, White House-brokered commitment from hyperscalers to bear the full cost of AI’s electricity buildout. It directly changes how utilities like AEP, Duke, and Dominion approach future interconnection negotiations. (White House)

X-energy and Talen Energy Sign SMR Agreement for PJM Market

X-energy and Talen Energy signed a Letter of Intent March 19 to evaluate deploying three or more four-unit XE-100 small modular reactor plants across Pennsylvania and the PJM Interconnection market, the grid serving 65 million people from Illinois to New Jersey. The XE-100 is an 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, a design that uses helium instead of water as a coolant and can generate heat for industrial processes in addition to electricity. Talen already operates the Susquehanna nuclear station and has direct experience structuring hyperscale power deals. Talen’s stock rose 7.1% on the announcement. (World Nuclear News)

Bipartisan REWIRE Act Would Fast-Track Grid Capacity Upgrades

Senators Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced the REWIRE Act in early March, creating a categorical exclusion from full environmental review for grid capacity projects built within existing rights-of-way. Reconductoring, upgrading existing transmission towers with advanced high-capacity wires that can double or triple power flow without new construction, could cut U.S. grid infrastructure costs by $85 billion by 2035 according to industry estimates. The bill also directs FERC to increase financial returns for utilities that deploy advanced conductors, giving them a direct incentive to move faster. Transmission permitting is the single biggest bottleneck between new power generation and the load growth AI is driving. (Senator Welch)

FERC Approves 11 New Cybersecurity Standards for the Power Grid

FERC unanimously approved 11 updated Critical Infrastructure Protection standards March 19, enabling secure use of virtualization technologies across the high-voltage transmission system and tightening baseline cybersecurity requirements for all grid-connected systems. New mandates include updated password protocols for remote access and intrusion detection requirements for lower-impact grid assets that were previously lightly regulated. As AI data centers connect to the grid in ever-larger blocks, a cyberattack on a control system near a major data center cluster is a scenario utilities and operators now model explicitly. The updated standards are the regulatory foundation that lets utilities safely adopt the software-defined grid management tools now in wide deployment. (FERC)

Have fun this week.

- Will

AI Power Weekly

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