The scale of American AI infrastructure buildout continued to climb this week. Brookfield Asset Management and NextEra Energy unveiled a $100 billion AI data center campus at the former DOE Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky, pairing more than 1.2 GW of compute with 2 GW of dedicated natural gas generation, up to 2.6 GW of battery storage, and roughly 8,000 peak construction jobs. Meta and BlackRock formed a $14 billion venture to build and operate a 1 GW data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock funds taking an 80 percent stake backed by $12.5 billion of debt financing and over 4,000 peak construction jobs, 2,300 workers already on site. Argent LNG secured Department of Energy approval to export nearly 1.3 trillion cubic feet per year of LNG from its proposed Port Fourchon Louisiana terminal to FTA countries and now targets FID within two years. NextDecade reported on its Q2 earnings call that Rio Grande LNG Phase 1 construction is running ahead of schedule with first gas expected later this year, first LNG production in H1 2027, and Train 6 FID targeted in H2 2027, backed by a $1 billion term loan and a $3.5 billion senior secured notes offering rated BBB minus. AMD and Core Scientific committed $14 billion over multiple years pairing MI series GPUs with 2.5 GW of dedicated compute. Applied Digital locked in $36.2 billion of long term AI data center leases, the largest neocloud capacity contract on record. FirstEnergy disclosed a 25 GW AI data center interconnect pipeline with 6.4 GW already under contract. AG and P Industrial broke ground on an 85 hectare modular fabrication yard in Batangas targeting 80,000 metric tons per year of throughput serving LNG, oil and gas, refining, chemicals, and digital infrastructure clients. AGC state employment data continued to show Texas leading absolute gains at 24,800 construction jobs year over year and Louisiana leading percentage gains at 7.7 percent, while California lost the most jobs in the nation at 15,400. And the labor picture hardened further with ABC estimating the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 to meet demand and 92 percent of construction firms reporting difficulty finding workers.
Brookfield and NextEra Announce $100 Billion Paducah Kentucky AI Campus at Former DOE Uranium Enrichment Site
Brookfield Asset Management and NextEra Energy unveiled the Paducah American Energy Hub this week, a $100 billion AI data center campus at the former DOE Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky. The campus will host more than 1.2 GW of AI compute capacity backed by dedicated power generation built specifically for the project. Brookfield will develop and operate the campus. NextEra will build up to 2 GW of natural gas fired power generation and up to 2.6 GW of battery energy storage. The partners expect the campus to support up to 1.8 GW of utility capacity by 2032. The Big Rivers Electric Power Corporation, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, and Paducah Power System are also participating. DOE selected Brookfield following its November 2025 Request for Offers to lease land and develop the campus at the Paducah site. DOE picked NextEra to build and own the dedicated generation resources.
The project is expected to create approximately 8,000 construction jobs at peak and 600 permanent operations positions. Site selection is significant on its own merits. The former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant operated from 1952 to 2013 as the last uranium enrichment facility in the United States, and the site retains substantial existing power infrastructure, industrial water access, and heavy civil connections. Reusing that infrastructure is what makes 1.2 GW of AI compute economic at Paducah when transmission constraints have stalled comparable projects in nearly every other geography. Paying to interconnect a new gigawatt scale campus to the transmission grid in 2026 is a multi year, multi billion dollar exercise. Paying to interconnect a new gigawatt scale campus to a decommissioned DOE nuclear facility that already has the substation, water, and heavy industrial permitting in place is a fundamentally faster path.
The pattern is the same one playing out at Beacon Point in Nueces County Texas and at Hyperion in Richland Parish Louisiana. Owners are going where power, water, permitting, and craft workforce access are already proven, and they are willing to write nine to twelve figure checks to lock those sites down. Paducah joins Beacon Point and Hyperion on the short list of American gigawatt scale AI infrastructure campuses that have gone from concept to hard capital allocation inside a single quarter. The Kentucky announcement also puts the DOE squarely in the middle of the AI infrastructure story. Federal land leases at other DOE and DOD sites will now become the template for the next wave of gigawatt scale campuses.
Meta and BlackRock Form $14 Billion El Paso Venture, 1 GW of Compute Capacity, 80 Percent BlackRock, $12.5 Billion of Debt Financing
Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion venture on Tuesday to develop and operate a 1 GW data center campus in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock funds will hold an 80 percent interest in the venture, with Meta retaining the remaining 20 percent. A portion of BlackRock's investment will be funded with proceeds from $12.5 billion of debt financing. Meta will contribute land and construction in progress assets valued at approximately $2.3 billion, while BlackRock will make a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion. Meta will receive a one time distribution of approximately $1 billion to align the ownership split. The campus, already under construction in El Paso near the Texas New Mexico border, is designed to provide 1 GW of compute capacity essential for Meta's AI technologies. Operations are expected to commence in 2028.
The El Paso campus represents an investment of over $10 billion from Meta, supporting more than 4,000 construction jobs at peak and 300 permanent operations jobs once complete. Over 2,300 workers are already on site. Meta will enter into lease agreements with the venture for use of the entire data center campus. The leases have a four year initial term with four options to extend, providing Meta with long term flexibility over a potential 20 year term. Meta will also provide residual value guarantees with an aggregate threshold of approximately $13 billion that decreases over time. If certain conditions are met within the first 16 years of the lease term, Meta's maximum RVG payment would equal any shortfall between the fair value at that time and the RVG threshold for the covered property.
The El Paso venture is the second Meta and BlackRock structured deal in the last month, following the $12 billion BlackRock led financing package for Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish Louisiana. The pattern is now clear. Meta is monetizing land and construction in progress at scale, letting institutional capital hold 80 percent of the campus economics, and paying long dated triple net style lease payments back to the venture. That structure moves the capital expenditure off Meta's balance sheet and turns it into an operating expense that flows through Meta's income statement over the 20 year term. BlackRock earns a levered return on infrastructure at scale. Both parties get exactly what they need. The market gets a template for financing AI infrastructure at a scale that a single hyperscaler cannot fund on its own balance sheet, even one with Meta's cash generation.
El Paso is worth pausing on as a site. It is one of the largest metros on the Texas New Mexico border, and it sits at the intersection of Texas ERCOT power access, growing New Mexico renewable resources, and the closest deep water gulf port at 800 miles by rail. It also sits in a lower cost labor market than Austin, Dallas, or Houston, and Meta had already committed over $10 billion and mobilized 2,300 workers on site before the BlackRock deal closed. This is exactly the kind of executable, permitted, staffed site that institutional capital wants to underwrite in 2026.
Argent LNG Wins FTA Export Permit for 1.3 Tcf per Year From Port Fourchon Louisiana, Targets FID Within Two Years
US developer Argent LNG announced this week that it received Department of Energy approval to export nearly 1.3 trillion cubic feet per year of LNG from its proposed Port Fourchon terminal in Louisiana to countries with US free trade agreements. Argent said it is now targeting FID within two years. The 1.3 Tcf per year export volume translates to roughly 25 million metric tons per annum of LNG capacity, positioning Argent LNG as one of the largest greenfield LNG export terminals under development in the United States. The Port Fourchon site sits in Lafourche Parish on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, immediately adjacent to the country's largest deep water offshore energy service base and directly on the coast in the middle of the Gulf's most established maritime and industrial infrastructure corridor.
Argent LNG's FTA permit is a material regulatory milestone. The DOE has continued to issue FTA authorizations through 2026, and combined with the non FTA export authorization pathway administered by DOE and the FERC siting authorization pathway, Argent is now moving from concept phase into serious project execution. A two year FID window aligns with the pattern established by Rio Grande LNG, Commonwealth LNG, Delfin FLNG, Louisiana LNG, and Texas LNG. Each of those projects went through a multi year regulatory and offtake commercialization period, and each is now in construction or approaching mechanical completion. Argent LNG is following the same playbook.
Port Fourchon deserves its own consideration. It is one of the largest offshore energy service ports in the world, host to Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), and it directly serves the deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil and gas production complex. It has decades of institutional experience with maritime construction, offshore fabrication, and heavy industrial staging. Building a 25 MMtpa LNG export terminal at Port Fourchon leverages that existing supply chain, that established marine access, and that mature industrial workforce. Louisiana now has Commonwealth LNG (9.5 MTPA under construction at Cameron), Louisiana LNG (in construction at Lake Charles), Delfin FLNG (FID for Train 1 with Train 2 approaching FID at end of year), and Argent LNG (targeting FID within two years at Port Fourchon), plus Meta Hyperion at 5 GW and $50 billion in Richland Parish. Louisiana is now the single most concentrated industrial construction geography in the United States.
Rio Grande LNG Ahead of Schedule, AMD Core Scientific $14 Billion for 2.5 GW, Applied Digital $36.2 Billion of Locked Leases, FirstEnergy 25 GW Pipeline
NextDecade reported on its Q2 2026 earnings call this week that Rio Grande LNG Phase 1 construction at Brownsville Texas is running ahead of schedule. The company expects first gas later this year and first LNG production in the first half of 2027. Train 6 development is advancing with a formal FERC application filed and a final Environmental Impact Statement schedule supporting a potential FID in the second half of 2027. NextDecade also completed two key financing transactions during the quarter: a $1 billion term loan at the Phase 1 holding company level and a $3.5 billion senior secured notes offering rated BBB minus. The Train 6 offtake commercialization is progressing, with NextDecade expecting to announce new long term SPAs over the next six months as the company synchronizes contracting, EPC selection, and financing for a second half 2027 FID.
On the AI infrastructure side, AMD and Core Scientific committed $14 billion over multiple years pairing AMD's MI series GPUs with Core Scientific's 2.5 GW compute platform. Applied Digital locked in $36.2 billion of long term AI data center leases, the largest single neocloud capacity contract on record. FirstEnergy disclosed a 25 GW AI data center interconnect pipeline with 6.4 GW already under contract. Nvidia is in talks to provide a financing guarantee of up to $250 billion to OpenAI to lease computing capacity from the $500 billion, 10 GW SoftBank SB Energy campus planned in Ohio for 2028. Galaxy Digital plans a mega data center campus near Waco Texas, diversifying from blockchain into AI infrastructure in the ERCOT deregulated market. Energy Vault broke ground this week on a Crusoe Cloud powered AI campus in Snyder Texas targeting an initial 8 MW deployment expandable to 25 MW and ultimately a 500 MW site.
Two things are worth noting about all of this activity. First, the counterparty quality curve continues to steepen. Rio Grande LNG is now issuing BBB minus investment grade rated debt at $3.5 billion, and AI data center campuses are being financed by BlackRock, Brookfield, NextEra, and DOE joint structures. This is no longer a story about venture capital cycles or crypto financing structures. This is the largest institutional and utility capital pools in the world underwriting American industrial infrastructure at generational scale. Second, the pattern of dedicated behind the meter power continues to accelerate. Every one of the major campuses announced in 2026 (Beacon Point, Hyperion, Paducah, Kilby, Snyder, Childress, Hall County, Waco, El Paso) either includes dedicated power generation or contracted transmission scope integrated into the campus development. The grid is no longer a given. Owners are building their own grid.
Workforce Squeeze: Texas +24,800 and Louisiana +7.7 Percent Lead the Country, 349,000 Net New Workers Needed in 2026, 92 Percent of Firms Report Difficulty Hiring
The construction labor picture continued to tighten this week. The Associated General Contractors of America's June state analysis, released to broader coverage during the past week, confirmed that Texas added the most construction jobs of any state in the country year over year at 24,800, and Louisiana posted the largest percentage gain at 7.7 percent. California lost the most construction jobs in the nation at minus 15,400. Virginia, New York, Georgia, and Michigan rounded out the top five states for job losses. Construction employment grew in only 33 states and DC, meaning less than half the states added construction jobs in the past year. The regional divergence is now permanent. Texas, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast execution corridor are the geographies where construction demand is landing. California, the Northeast, and the Mid Atlantic are shedding construction employment.
The bigger picture is starker. Associated Builders and Contractors estimated this week that the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to meet demand. 92 percent of construction firms reported difficulty finding workers. Nearly 40 percent of skilled tradespeople are over the age of 45. Roughly 10,000 Americans turn 65 every single day. Analysts estimate that the United States will need approximately 650,000 to 725,000 construction and extraction workers each year through the mid 2030s just to replace workers who retire or leave the field. If current recruitment and workforce stability policies do not change, projections show that millions of skilled trades positions could remain unfilled by 2030.
The immigration and enforcement dimension is now material. Reporting this week from the Rio Grande Valley described contractors losing roughly two thirds of their crews due to worksite enforcement activity, with projects running weeks or months behind schedule as a direct result. The Supreme Court's June ruling in Mullin v. Doe cleared the way for Temporary Protected Status terminations covering hundreds of thousands of workers concentrated in construction, healthcare, and food processing. The Trump administration expanded the H-2B seasonal visa cap by approximately 65,000 for fiscal year 2026 to relieve some employer pressure, but the aggregate labor supply picture is tightening, not loosening. The National Association of Home Builders noted that foreign born workers account for more than a third of residential construction trades.
Modular Fabrication Yard Scale Up: AG and P Batangas 85 Hectares and 80,000 Metric Tons per Year, and the Global Modular Race
AG and P Industrial broke ground this week on an 85 hectare module fabrication yard in San Pascual, Batangas, Philippines. The facility will have an annual fabrication capacity of 80,000 metric tons. Construction is expected to commence soon with target fabrication readiness by late Q4 2026 and quayside operations slated for Q4 2027. The facility will manufacture modular components that can be transported and assembled at project sites, serving industries including oil and gas, LNG, renewable energy, power, refining, chemicals, digital infrastructure, and other industrial sectors. Separately, Chinese manufacturers reported 45 percent year over year growth in prefabricated building exports in Q1 2026, with CIMC Modular and other Chinese modular fabricators shipping data center, hotel, school, and public infrastructure modules globally.
The takeaway is that modular fabrication yard capacity is being built out worldwide at the largest scale the industry has ever seen, and Asia is aggressively adding capacity that will target the same end markets American fabricators serve. This is not an incremental competitive threat. It is the industrialization of modular execution at continental scale, and it is happening at exactly the moment when American industrial infrastructure demand is running ahead of domestic execution capacity. The strategic response for American fabricators is not to compete on unit cost with Asian modular yards. It is to compete on integrated execution capability, local content requirements, regulatory alignment (Buy America, Buy American, executive orders on federal projects and DOE partnered developments like Paducah), and speed to installation. And it is to own the craft workforce platform end to end.
The Paducah campus, the Meta El Paso venture, Rio Grande LNG Train 6, Commonwealth LNG, Louisiana LNG, Argent LNG, Delfin FLNG, and the entire Beacon Point and Hyperion cluster all require American executed scope of work on American soil, deployed by American craft workforce inside American shop capacity. That is exactly what the PSV Industries operating model delivers. The vertically integrated joint venture structure eliminates the coordination cost between shop fabrication, modular assembly, field installation, and craft workforce mobilization, and it delivers scope of work that is directly aligned with owner and EPC schedule commitments.
The Bottom Line
Brookfield and NextEra Energy unveiled a $100 billion Paducah Kentucky AI campus at the former DOE Gaseous Diffusion Plant, with 1.2 GW of compute, 2 GW of dedicated natural gas generation, up to 2.6 GW of battery storage, and approximately 8,000 peak construction jobs. Meta and BlackRock formed a $14 billion, 1 GW venture in El Paso Texas with $12.5 billion of debt financing behind an 80 percent BlackRock stake, 4,000 peak construction jobs, and 2,300 workers already on site targeting 2028 operations. Argent LNG won DOE approval to export nearly 1.3 trillion cubic feet per year of LNG from Port Fourchon Louisiana, targeting FID within two years and roughly 25 MMtpa of nameplate capacity. NextDecade reported Rio Grande LNG Phase 1 ahead of schedule with first gas expected later this year, first LNG in H1 2027, and Train 6 FID targeted in H2 2027 backed by $4.5 billion of new debt financing. AMD and Core Scientific committed $14 billion for 2.5 GW of dedicated compute. Applied Digital locked in $36.2 billion of long term AI data center leases. FirstEnergy disclosed a 25 GW AI data center interconnect pipeline with 6.4 GW already under contract. AG and P Industrial broke ground on an 85 hectare modular fabrication yard in Batangas targeting 80,000 metric tons per year of throughput. AGC state data confirmed Texas added 24,800 construction jobs year over year (the most of any state) and Louisiana posted 7.7 percent growth (the fastest in the nation), while California lost 15,400 construction jobs. And ABC estimated the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 with 92 percent of construction firms reporting difficulty finding workers.
The pattern is now fully established across every dimension. Capital allocation into American industrial infrastructure is running at generational scale. Institutional debt is financing gigawatt scale AI campuses at BBB minus investment grade. DOE and federal land lease structures are enabling reuse of decommissioned nuclear and industrial sites at $100 billion of capital deployment per project. Louisiana and Texas are the two states running the largest concentrated industrial buildouts in the country, and they are also the two states with the fastest construction employment growth. California, the Northeast, and the Mid Atlantic are shedding jobs and blocking permits. Behind the meter power generation is now standard scope of work on every gigawatt scale campus, and that generation is delivered by modular fabricators. Craft workforce is the single most valuable strategic asset in the industry, and 92 percent of construction firms cannot find enough workers to meet demand. Immigration enforcement is compressing supply while demand grows. The equipment supply squeeze from last week's coverage remains in place. PSV Industries is a vertically integrated joint venture operating in exactly the geographies where this buildout is landing, executing exactly the scope of work these campuses require, with the American craft workforce platform that this industry needs. The work is here. The capital is here. The constraint is execution capacity, and PSV is built to deliver it.