Eielson AFB PFAS plume is spreading, Air Force warns data center bidders

The U.S. Air Force is offering to lease roughly 8,700 acres at three Alaska installations — Eielson Air Force Base, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, and Clear Space Force Station — to commercial developers looking to build AI data centers, with proposals due by 5 p.m. Central on June 29. Its own solicitation documents are unusually frank about the complications at Eielson, where parts of the offered land sit in or near a PFAS contamination plume the Air Force says is still moving.

PFAS contamination has been documented at Eielson for years, and the solicitation's Q&A materials map it parcel by parcel: Site 4 is confirmed inside the plume, while Sites 2, 3, and the lower portion of Site 5 are flagged as "PFAS likely." The Air Force Civil Engineer Center cautioned that land shown outside the plume on a 2024 map may fall within it "now or in the future." A site-specific Environmental Baseline Survey — the standard tool for measuring contamination at a given parcel — must be completed before any lease executes, and none has been done for any Eielson site. In one sense that disclosure is the process working: as-is federal land deals are meant to surface exactly these unknowns before anyone signs.

The terms put the risk and the legwork on the developer. Parcels lease as-is/where-is under 10 U.S.C. § 2667 with no warranties; the Air Force will supply no power, water, or sewer, leaving offerors to secure utilities themselves; and lessees must cover up to $250,000 in government transaction costs at signing. Leases run up to 50 years but can be revoked when national defense requires. Two parcels carry added snags — Sites 4 and 5 sit in zones (Housing and E-Hill) that bar industrial use, Site 3 has no vehicle access, and floodplain, permafrost, and an explosives-safety zone touch various sites.

Local governments would also have a say. A sixth Q&A document issued Thursday confirms that construction permits at Eielson run through North Pole and the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and any onsite power generation must coordinate with the Alaska Energy Authority and the Railbelt grid under state law.

The bottom line the documents themselves draw: the land may be contaminated, the plume boundary is still shifting, and the survey needed to resolve each parcel's true condition hasn't been done — leaving developers to weigh an unusual opportunity against an unusual stack of unknowns.