Three Threads, One Atomic Inheritance

In April 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a Request for Information identifying sixteen federal sites “uniquely positioned for rapid data center construction, including in-place energy infrastructure with the ability to fast-track permitting for new energy generation such as nuclear.” The program was justified under two executive orders: Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence and Unleashing American Energy.

The framing came from Energy Secretary Chris Wright:

“The global race for AI dominance is the next Manhattan project, and with President Trump's leadership and the innovation of our National Labs, the United States can and will win.”

That sentence is not metaphor. The original Manhattan Project sited its three core facilities — Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Hanford in Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico — on land taken from Indigenous nations using federal preemption of state authority. The same legal architecture is in use now. Two of the four sites the DOE has narrowed for AI data center development sit on that same land: Oak Ridge Reservation on historic Cherokee territory, and Savannah River Site on historic Westo and Yuchi territory.

This is the first of several findings worth holding together.

Three Threads, One Inheritance

Three things are happening at once. They were not announced as one program and they will not be defended as one program, but they are running on the same track, fed by the same investors, justified by the same words from the same podium. They share a fuel cycle. They share a legal vulnerability. They share an end.

The first runs through the Department of Energy. Sixteen federal sites flagged for what the DOE calls rapid data center construction. Four of them moved to the front of the line — three of those four are former nuclear weapons production complexes. The land has been federal since the Manhattan Project. The state cannot regulate it. The neighboring communities cannot stop it. The leases are being signed now.

The second is Stargate. Five hundred billion dollars announced from the White House in January 2025, with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund called MGX as the named partners. Seven sites on private commercial land. The administration calls it the next Manhattan Project. They mean it.

The third is the one most people will never hear about — the one Krystal Two Bulls has been documenting one tribal council meeting at a time. Between 103 and 160 hyperscale data centers proposed on or adjacent to Indigenous land. Nondisclosure agreements signed before the actual project is named. Corporate subsidiaries doing the talking so the parent company never has to. The communities being asked to host them are not permitted to know who is moving in.

Three threads. One frame. One inheritance.

The corporate-tenant mapping that produced this article resolved one shell entity at one site after weeks of public-record searching. The rest of the proposals remain locked behind nondisclosure architecture. That opacity is the signature of the buildout, not a gap in the reporting.

What follows is the documented record. The threads are kept separate so the reader can see exactly where each one is firmly grounded and where each one still has open questions. Conflating them weakens every legitimate piece of the story. The version that holds is the one I'm publishing here.

Thread One: The Sixteen Sites

The DOE Request for Information, dated April 2025, identifies sixteen federal sites for “rapid data center construction.” The Department's Office of Policy has narrowed those sixteen to four priority sites that have moved into active solicitation. The four:

• Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Kentucky) — 3,500 acres, 3 gigawatts of grid capacity, 30 million gallons per day of available water
• Oak Ridge Reservation (Tennessee) — the original Manhattan Project Y-12 and X-10 complex
• Idaho National Laboratory — 62,000 acres, history of 52 nuclear reactors built and tested on site
• Savannah River Site (South Carolina) — the production complex that made plutonium and tritium for the U.S. hydrogen bomb arsenal

Three of the four are former nuclear weapons production complexes. The fourth has the longest reactor-testing history in the country. The selection logic is fuel-cycle infrastructure, deep grid capacity, existing federal jurisdictional preemption from state regulators, and a workforce already cleared for sensitive work.

The Portsmouth Resolution

The fifth site that has already resolved — Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, on the original sixteen but not among the priority four — is worth examining in detail because the corporate stack at Portsmouth has now been documented in a way the others have not.

In December 2025, local public radio in Ohio reported that a newly registered Ohio LLC called New Day Data Centers was proposing to build a data center at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The company had no online presence. It had been registered in August 2025. Reporters could find no parent entity. The project was sealed under nondisclosure agreement.

Five months later, the chain resolved.

New Day Data Centers LLC is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy as landlord and SoftBank Group as the operating tenant, with SB Energy — SoftBank's subsidiary, founded in 2011 — as the operating entity. The project is a 10-gigawatt build with 9.2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas generation. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described it on the record as a “$33 billion dollar power project in Portsmouth,” tied to Japan's announced $550 billion investment commitment in U.S. infrastructure.

SB Energy is also the operating entity for the Stargate Milam County, Texas site. SoftBank is a major equity investor in OpenAI.

The Paducah AI data center solicitation closed January 30, 2026. Applicants have not been publicly disclosed. Oak Ridge and Savannah River remain in RFP stage. The disclosure timeline for the remaining priority three is sometime in 2026.

Shell entities resolving months after community concern is raised, and only when Commerce Secretary statements force the corporate identity into public view.

Thread Two: Stargate

On January 21, 2025, at a White House press conference, President Trump announced the formation of Stargate LLC. The named partners were OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, with investment from MGX — an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth investment firm chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The commitment: up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States by 2029. The chairman: Masayoshi Son of SoftBank.

Stargate is incorporated in Delaware. It has been openly compared to the Manhattan Project by industry analysts and by some of its own backers. It is named after the 1994 film Stargate, in which the stargates were portals to other worlds.

Stargate is not siting on DOE land. Its seven publicly named U.S. sites are on private commercial land selected for ordinary corporate reasons — cheap power, fast permitting, tax incentives, grid access:

• Abilene, Texas (flagship) — Crusoe Energy + Oracle, NVIDIA Blackwell hardware already operational
• Shackelford County, Texas — Vantage Data Centers + Oracle
• Doña Ana County, New Mexico — Stack Infrastructure + BorderPlex Digital Assets (Project Jupiter)
• Lordstown, Ohio — SoftBank + Foxconn joint venture (manufacturing + data)
• Milam County, Texas — SB Energy (SoftBank)
• Port Washington, Wisconsin — Vantage + Oracle (Project Lighthouse)
• Saline Township, Michigan — Related Digital + Oracle (The Barn)

Total announced commitment now exceeds $400 billion. Capacity targets approach 10 gigawatts. The March 2026 funding round raised $122 billion, with Amazon contributing $50 billion, NVIDIA $30 billion, SoftBank $30 billion, and Microsoft also participating. Total equity raised to date exceeds $170 billion.

Hardware: NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 NVL72 racks at 120 kilowatts per rack and approximately $3.9 million per rack all-in. AMD will supply up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs under a separate agreement that may include OpenAI taking a 10% stake in AMD. Broadcom will supply 10 gigawatts of custom OpenAI silicon beginning in late 2026.

Stargate is enormous. Stargate's siting logic is conventional. Stargate does not, on the public record, route through DOE land or tribal land. Anyone telling you it does is making a claim the evidence does not support.

What Stargate does share with the DOE program is its investor network. SoftBank appears in both. Larry Ellison's Oracle is the dominant data center operator across the Stargate footprint and is reportedly active in DOE program discussions. The political framing — “next Manhattan Project” — is identical across both. The MGX participation introduces foreign sovereign wealth into U.S. AI infrastructure in a way that should, on its face, trigger CFIUS review. Whether such review has happened, and what it concluded, is a discoverable question that has not been answered publicly.

Thread Three: The Pressure on Tribal Land

In April 2026 on Democracy Now!, Krystal Two Bulls — executive director of Honor the Earth, Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne — described the third thread.

Her organization has documented between 103 and 160 proposed hyperscale data centers on or adjacent to Indigenous land. The corporations approaching tribal councils are using subsidiaries and Native-owned energy companies as the public-facing counterparties. They are arriving with nondisclosure agreements already drafted. The initial pitch is often solar power. The pitch shifts to a hyperscale data center after the NDA is signed. By that point the tribal leadership is legally accountable to the corporation, not to the citizens they were elected to represent.

The targeting criteria are explicit: large land base, water access, tax incentives, weak legal infrastructure to hold corporations accountable, jurisdictional ambiguity, and economic precarity that makes promised jobs irresistible.

The Northern Cheyenne Case

The Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana is the documented case. NorthWestern Energy and the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN), a federal program run out of Idaho National Laboratory, have proposed refurbishing a coal refinery just outside the reservation into a Small Modular Reactor, with the explicit purpose of powering a proposed hyperscale data center. Montana HB 623 was passed to authorize nuclear waste storage facilities in the state. Montana HB 696 was passed to authorize uranium conversion and enrichment sites. An amendment to HB 623 would have required tribal approval for the siting of nuclear waste near reservation land. The amendment passed the Montana House. It was stripped in the Montana Senate.

The corporate tenant — the actual customer who would receive the compute output of the proposed Northern Cheyenne data center — has not been disclosed. NorthWestern Energy has not named it. GAIN has not named it. Honor the Earth has been unable to surface it. The community is being asked to consent to nuclear infrastructure to power a data center whose end-user they are not permitted to know.

The Operational Footprint

The impact figures Two Bulls documented hold across the broader buildout:

Water

300,000 to 5 million gallons per facility per year. The “closed-loop, zero water impact” pitch is verifiably misleading because evaporative cooling-tower rejection consumes water regardless of internal-loop design.

Noise

97 decibels at the property line. Long-term exposure causes measurable hearing loss. For comparison, a long-range acoustic device (sound cannon) operates at 140 decibels.

Heat Islands

Up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit of warming on the surrounding land. Ecological collapse documented in surrounding waterways.

Cost Shifting

Ratepayers approve upfront infrastructure costs through public utility commissions before the facility is even built. Montana residential electricity bills have already nearly doubled.

Jobs Reality

Rapid City, South Dakota's hyperscale facility went from 1,500 construction jobs to three full-time positions once the build phase ended.

The 103-160 proposed sites are the working count. The actual number is almost certainly higher, because the NDA architecture is specifically designed to prevent comprehensive accounting before approvals are signed.

The Fuel Cycle That Closes the Loop

Here is the structural finding that ties the three threads together — and this is a real convergence, not pattern recognition reaching too far.

In August 2025, a uranium enrichment startup called General Matter signed a lease with the DOE at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The company is led by Scott Nolan, a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. Peter Thiel sits on its board. The lease covers a $1.5 billion enrichment facility. The product: High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU.

In January 2026, General Matter received a $900 million federal contract from the DOE for HALEU production. The State of Kentucky provided $14 million in tax breaks. The projected employment: 140 jobs over 15 years.

A $1.5 billion facility creating 140 jobs is not an economic development project. It is a strategic-asset filing.

HALEU is the fuel that the next generation of Small Modular Reactors requires. The same SMR class that GAIN is proposing at Northern Cheyenne. The same SMR class that TerraPower — chaired by Bill Gates — is building under contract to Meta near Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Meta's Project Cosmo data center is already under construction. TerraPower's Natrium reactor design is approved for deployment on tribal-adjacent and federal land sites across the West.

The chain is closed:

The investors at the top of this stack are a small network. Peter Thiel (fuel production). Masayoshi Son (data centers and equity in OpenAI). Larry Ellison (data center operations and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hosting OpenAI workloads). Sam Altman (compute customer). Bill Gates (reactors). Jensen Huang (chips, with NVIDIA also a $30 billion equity investor in OpenAI). The same firms are simultaneously suppliers, operators, customers, and equity holders of each other.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a corporate-state architecture in which the natural incentive gradient of each individual actor flows in the same direction.

The federal government provides land and fast-tracked permitting. The investors provide capital. The customers are themselves equity holders in the suppliers. The communities at the receiving end — federal land neighbors, tribal nations, rate-paying ratepayers — are not at the table.

What the Prior Administration Did and Did Not Do

A natural question follows: did the Biden administration's federal land actions lay the groundwork for what is happening now? The honest answer is that the record points the opposite direction on land management, and a narrower direction on financial architecture.

What Biden did on federal land was almost entirely restrictive of extraction, not expansive of federal control. The federal government already owned approximately 640 million acres before Biden took office. He did not federalize new land. He changed how the existing federal estate was managed.

Specifically:

• Ten new national monuments designated, plus the restoration of Bears Ears (to 1.36 million acres) and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
• The Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, designated in 2023, specifically banned new uranium mining within its boundaries.
• The BLM Public Lands Rule (finalized May 2024) put conservation on equal footing with extraction.
• Three high-profile mineral withdrawals in 2023: Chaco Culture (oil and gas), Boundary Waters (mining), and Grand Canyon monument (uranium).
• The November 2024 coal leasing ban removed 1.7 million acres of Montana's Powder River Basin from future coal leasing.
• The Tribal Homelands Initiative (November 2021) created co-stewardship agreements giving tribes enhanced management input over federal lands.

The current administration is rescinding all of it. The BLM Public Lands Rule was canceled in May 2026. The coal leasing ban is being reversed. Bears Ears is being targeted for shrinkage again. The Grand Canyon uranium withdrawal is being undone. A Utah uranium mine was fast-tracked in eleven days; the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe called it a rubber stamp.

The narrower place where the prior administration did contribute enabling conditions is financial. The Inflation Reduction Act's nuclear production tax credit (45U), the advanced manufacturing credit (45X), and the broader advanced-reactor financial framework made TerraPower's economics, General Matter's economics, and the whole SMR class financially viable in a way they were not previously. The CHIPS Act established the bipartisan doctrinal baseline that semiconductors and computing are critical infrastructure deserving of federal subsidy. The current “Manhattan Project” framing builds on that doctrinal foundation while reversing the land protections.

The honest framing: Biden's financial architecture enabled the economics of the current buildout. Biden's land restrictions are being actively dismantled to clear the siting path. The two layers point in opposite directions, and treating them as a single continuous policy obscures the actual structural choices being made.

The Climate Around Tribal Citizens

A separate documented pattern matters here because it bears on the negotiating environment in which the tribal-land siting decisions are being made.

Beginning in January 2026, multiple tribal citizens reported being stopped, detained, or having tribal IDs dismissed as “fake” by federal immigration agents. Peter Yazzie, a Navajo Nation citizen, was pulled out of his car at a Peoria gas station, presented his Certificate of Indian Blood and driver's license, and was detained anyway. Leticia Jacobo, a Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community citizen and Iowa resident, was confused with a deportation-detainer subject of the same name in Polk County and held until the tribal nation intervened.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sent tribal leaders a letter calling such claims “false.” The Navajo Nation reactivated Operation Rainbow Bridge — originally a 2023 response to the AHCCCS sober-living home Medicaid fraud scandal — and repurposed the hotline for ICE tracking. Arizona passed legislation, effective January 2026, allowing Native Americans to request a “Native American” designation on a state driver's license. More than 1,650 requests came in within the first month. The New Mexico version of the bill was killed in committee.

There is no documented evidence that ICE enforcement against tribal citizens is part of a coordinated land-clearing strategy, and this article does not allege one. The reporting does not support that claim.

What the reporting does support is something more structural and in some ways more important. A tribal council sitting down with a hyperscale corporation's subsidiary to negotiate a data center lease does so in a political environment where its own citizens are being detained by federal agents who do not respect tribal IDs. They sit down knowing the federal government's posture toward their sovereignty is uncertain. They sit down knowing the state legislature next door just stripped tribal-approval requirements from nuclear waste statutes. They sit down knowing the federal mineral withdrawals near their sacred sites are being rescinded by executive action.

The pressures are not coordinated. They cumulatively weaken every tribal nation's negotiating position at every table simultaneously. That is the climate Two Bulls is describing when she calls the buildout data colonialism. The phrase is structural. It names the architecture, not a conspiracy.

In the same week of May 2026, the San Diego County District Attorney, the Pala Band of Mission Indians, the Jamul Indian Village of California, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs signed a memorandum of understanding addressing the seven-times-the-national-average murder rate for Indigenous women and girls in California. The MOU works around a jurisdictional gap — federal jurisdiction on tribal land, state jurisdiction off it — that has historically made Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons cases unsolvable.

The same federal-state jurisdictional architecture that fails Indigenous women on the public-safety side is the architecture that hyperscale corporations are exploiting on the land-siting side. The architecture is the same. The harm vectors are different.

What the Public Should Know

The headline finding, in plain language:

An AI infrastructure buildout comparable in scale and rhetorical framing to the Manhattan Project is consolidating compute, fuel production, and reactor capacity across roughly two dozen sites in the United States. The federal portion is using legacy nuclear weapons sites. The private portion is using ordinary commercial land at unprecedented scale. A third pressure is landing on Indigenous land through nondisclosure agreements and corporate subsidiaries that obscure the actual end-tenants from the communities being asked to host them.

The legal architecture of all three vehicles routes around state regulatory authority.

The investor network at the top of the corporate stack is small and overlapping. Thiel, Son, Ellison, Altman, Gates, Huang. The same names appear across the fuel producer, the reactor builder, the data center operator, the AI customer, and the chip supplier — and the foreign sovereign wealth investor.

The nondisclosure agreement architecture is deliberate. Communities are being asked to approve projects without knowing the actual end-tenant, the actual end-use of the compute, the actual water draw, or how their electricity costs will rise to pay for the infrastructure.

The fuel cycle is closing fast. Once HALEU production, SMR construction, and data center buildout reach operational scale, the political reversibility of the broader program drops significantly.

The historical precedent is exact. Oak Ridge and Savannah River sit on land taken for the original Manhattan Project from Indigenous nations. The “next Manhattan Project” framing is using both the legal architecture and the geography of the original program.

What Policymakers Should Do

Six specific asks follow directly from the documented record. None of them require new statutory authority. All of them are within existing congressional and executive oversight powers.

One. Beneficial Ownership Disclosure

Mandatory disclosure of ultimate beneficial ownership for any data center seeking a federal land lease, a tribal land lease, a federal energy tax credit, or a state-level tax abatement above a defined threshold. A shell LLC registered weeks before a $33 billion lease announcement should not be able to conceal its actual operating parent.

Two. CFIUS Review of MGX

Foreign sovereign-wealth participation in U.S. AI infrastructure that may eventually overlap with former nuclear weapons sites is a reviewable category under existing CFIUS authority. Whether the review has occurred for MGX's role in Stargate LLC, and what it concluded, should be a matter of public record.

Three. Tribal Approval Restoration

Restoration of the tribal-approval amendment to nuclear waste and uranium enrichment statutes at the state level. Montana HB 623 had it; the Senate stripped it. Tribal consent must not be optional on nuclear siting that affects reservation land.

Four. DOE Solicitation Transparency

Public disclosure of the DOE 16-site RFI responses and tenant selections, including the Paducah solicitation applicants and selection criteria. National security exemptions, if invoked, should be narrowly drawn and subject to congressional oversight.

Five. Independent Impact Studies

Independent water and grid impact studies on every hyperscale data center proposal, conducted by entities not paid by the developer. The “closed-loop water” pitch is verifiably misleading; the actual water consumption happens at the cooling-tower stage, which the developer's internal study will not flag.

Six. Mineral Withdrawal Restoration

Restoration of the federal mineral withdrawals near tribal sacred sites — particularly the Grand Canyon uranium withdrawal that is currently being rescinded.

What This Article Does Not Claim

For the record, to keep the published claims clean:

This article does not claim that Stargate, the DOE 16-site program, and tribal-land siting are a single coordinated buildout. They are three threads under one administration's policy umbrella, with overlapping investors and shared fuel-cycle infrastructure. That is what the record supports.

This article does not claim that ICE detentions of tribal citizens are part of a land-clearing strategy. The reporting does not support such a claim. The detentions are operationally driven by enforcement quotas and appearance-based screening. Their effect on the broader tribal sovereignty negotiating climate is real and is the framing used here.

This article does not claim that biological computing, organoids, or any exotic compute is being deployed on federal or tribal land. There is no evidence for that.

This article does not claim that the prior administration federalized land for the current buildout. The opposite is closer to true on the land-management dimension; the narrower truth on the financial-architecture dimension is named explicitly above.

What Comes Next

This is the first of three. Tomorrow I walk the four federal sites the administration has already lined up — Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Idaho National Laboratory, and Paducah — and quote the DOE's own officials calling this Manhattan Project 2.0. They're saying it out loud. The day after, I take you to Northern Cheyenne, where the host utility's own CEO has said on the record that the unnamed customer behind a hyperscale data center on tribal land is “probably” a federal contract. He doesn't know who. The tribe doesn't know who. Nobody is supposed to know who.

After that, the reporting keeps going. There's the MGX question — what is Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth doing inside U.S. AI infrastructure, and has CFIUS reviewed it. There's the money map — IRA tax credits, federal contracts, sovereign wealth equity, all flowing through the same fuel cycle. And there's the news cycle itself, which keeps handing me receipts faster than I can publish them.

The threads are open. The architecture is documented. The reporting will continue.