By Evan Halper, Hannah Natanson
A company led by former energy secretary and Texas governor Rick Perry has submitted a federal application to build a nuclear power complex on what sponsors say would be the world’s largest data-center campus – a project with a distinctly political veneer.
Republican Perry is co-founder of Fermi America, a Texas company that has said it will soon announce details of its grand vision for a property next to the Pantex nuclear weapons plant near Amarillo. Its confidential application for construction of four one-gigawatt reactors, obtained by The Washington Post, says the expansive facility will be called the Donald. J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.
There are few proposals in the United States for new, full-size nuclear power plants, which are associated with cost overruns and long engineering delays. Many tech and energy companies are focusing their efforts on developing smaller, modular reactors that in theory can be built faster and more cheaply.
Fermi Executive Chairman Toby Neugebauer, a Texas private equity investor, said he’s confident the firm can build the nuclear complex by 2032, an extremely ambitious timeline. He argues that its remote Texas Panhandle location will speed permitting and construction.
“If you can’t do it here, you can’t do it anywhere,” he said in an interview Thursday.
The complex will also include large natural gas plants, with pipelines in the area supplying so much of the fuel that company officials say they can eventually supply AI companies with 11 gigawatts of energy – an amount equivalent to that used by all of Manhattan – on gas alone, if the nuclear plans falter.
Crucial details of Fermi’s plans remain unclear, including the specific financial backing Perry and his partners have secured, making its viability difficult to judge at this early stage. Fermi is partnering with the Texas Tech University system on the project, and the company’s founders include Perry’s son, Griffin, an investor who also sits on the board of the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association, sponsor of the annual college football game. The company says its roster of executives will include experts who have helped finance and build large power projects around the world, including nuclear plants.
Fermi America social media postings frame the unusual project as an homage to Trump, who named Perry energy secretary during his first term and who is taking steps to weaken the independence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and give the White House more sway over nuclear energy approvals.
“It’s time we lead the charge to Make America Nuclear Again,” says a post on Fermi’s LinkedIn page, complemented with video of Trump turning his head stoically toward the camera. The White House did not respond to questions about the plan.
Fermi said it has not decided on a final name for the site, notwithstanding its use of the Trump moniker in its regulatory filings. The company says that it hopes to start construction on the nuclear plant next year and that it will have a large amount of gas power available for data centers on its campus by 2026.
The effort is among a variety of gargantuan data-center projects that are on the drawing board or being built in the U.S.
Fermi on its website features a quote from Perry promising a Texas-scale operation: “At Fermi America, we’re really not interested in building the second largest energy driven data center in the world, we’re gonna build the largest.”
Officials at the NRC confirmed the authenticity of Fermi’s licensing application, which they said will be posted publicly in the near future.
Fermi’s June 17 cover letter to the NRC says the company is seeking an expedited approval process, filing the application in phases “rather than to wait for all the information that may be ultimately required to come in.”
The application says each of the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors also will be named individually after the current White House occupant. Most experts say building a nuclear plant of the size Fermi is proposing could take roughly a decade.
The last AP1000 units to come online in the U.S., at the Vogtle plant in Georgia in 2023, were $17 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule. Efforts to build a pair of them at a site in South Carolina went so far over budget that regional utilities pulled the plug on the project in 2017 after spending $9 billion. The utilities are now trying to revive it, hoping a large tech firm or some other major industrial user will help bankroll completion.
Neugebauer says other countries, particularly China, are building the same AP1000 reactors on time and on budget. He argues that regulatory changes Trump has ordered change the playing field. “We want to build these reactors for America,” he said. “I am upset we as a country let it get to this place.”
The Fermi plans are taking shape as artificial-intelligence energy needs are soaring, with tech companies building ever-larger campuses to power the data centers that are the backbone of the industry. Also targeting Texas is the Stargate project, a collaboration led by OpenAI and SoftBank that is planning a five-gigawatt campus fueled by gas, renewable energy and possibly nuclear power in Abilene, Texas.
Meanwhile, a shortage of available energy is moving large tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Meta to lock down as much power as they can from existing nuclear plants.
Microsoft has struck a deal with the owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to reopen it as soon as 2027, with Microsoft purchasing all the energy it produces. Amazon will consume all the power from a different plant in Pennsylvania. And Meta just inked a deal to consume all the power from a nuclear plant in Illinois.
The deals come as the data centers are growing larger, sprawling over thousands of acres. Fermi says in its application with the NRC that the Trump Energy Campus would include “up to 18 million square feet of hyperscale computing space.”
The application lands at a time of turmoil at the NRC. Trump has signed several executive orders that would give the White House greater oversight of decision-making at the agency, which was set up to be independent of political influence but which the Trump team says is overly cautious and slow to approve projects.
The administration, according to two NRC employees not authorized to speak publicly, sent representatives from the U.S. DOGE Service to the agency this month. Soon after, the White House abruptly fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson, giving no reason. The firing rattled not only nuclear safety advocates but many in the industry who say NRC independence is crucial to a revival of nuclear energy in the U.S.
Also dismissed, according to the employees, was the executive director of operations – the highest-ranking career position at the agency – along with his deputies.
Asked about DOGE’s arrival at the NRC, a commission spokesman wrote in an email: “The agency continues to work with the Administration on improving efficiency.”
