DOE picks Amentum and DC Blox for a 1 GW AI data center at Savannah River Site

The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration has selected Amentum to lead a consortium, with DC Blox as the digital infrastructure partner, to negotiate a phased lease for a large-scale AI data center at the Savannah River Site in Aiken County, South Carolina. The proposed project calls for a 1-gigawatt data center campus supported by approximately 2 gigawatts of on-site power generation, starting with natural gas and planned to transition to advanced nuclear energy.

The on-site generation piece is the policy point here. The project is explicitly designed so the facility’s electricity needs are met without shifting costs to existing utility customers. That’s behind-the-meter at federal scale, and it’s not an accident: the Trump administration’s framing ties this directly to executive orders on federal land use and ratepayer protection. The NNSA says the project is still in negotiations for a phased lease, so nothing is built yet.

For South Carolina, this lands as the federal mirror image of the private data center fights in Spartanburg and Greenville. Residents in Spartanburg are suing to stop a private developer from running a 450-megawatt gas plant to power its own data center without a public review. Thirty miles south, the federal government just picked contractors for a project that’s more than twice the power generation scale, on federal land, with its own energy source. The behind-the-meter model that Valara Holdings is trying to build in Spartanburg under protest is exactly what the DOE is doing at Savannah River by design. That framing is going to come up in the Spartanburg legal fight.