Feb 28, 2026 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has issued a request for information (RFI) for an “on-premises next-generation AI compute data center.”
The proposed facility would be funded and operated by the DOE itself, separate from a broader initiative that would allow private operators to develop AI data centers on federal land, including at PNNL’s campus in Richland, Washington.
In a previously unreported RFI, PNNL contractor Battelle said that it was seeking to understand the data center requirements for "an advanced AI compute infrastructure capable of training and operationalization of multi-data Large Language Models (LLMs) for scientific and national governmental missions."
The system would be around 2MW at launch in 2028, with potential future expansion to ~40MW. It is expected to be capable of supporting training and inference workloads.
