State decides to offer 50-year lease for gas-fired data center south of Deadhorse

Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner John Crowther signed a decision Tuesday to offer STAK Energy Corp. a 50-year lease on 715.4 acres of state land for a natural gas-powered data center campus about 26 miles south of Deadhorse.

The decision comes days after STAK said ExxonMobil had signed a 15-year deal to supply gas to the project, which the company calls Project Aaka.

The site sits a mile west of the Dalton Highway at Milepost 390, in the North Slope Borough. Plans call for a 640-acre gravel pad, a 1.8-mile access road and a power plant built to generate 1 to 3 gigawatts for the data center's computers. The plant will not connect to the Railbelt or any other grid. The state says cold North Slope air lets the facility use dry air cooling instead of the large amounts of water used to cool data centers farther south.

Construction is expected to take six years and employ up to 1,500 workers at its peak, according to the final finding and decision. Operations are expected to employ 50 to 150 people. A preliminary decision in May had put that number at about 60.

That preliminary decision said the lease would support Alaska's first data center project. STAK applied in November 2025. The Division of Oil and Gas received no interest from anyone else in the site and moved ahead with a negotiated lease. It received 1,205 public comments.

The pad will require about 7.1 million cubic yards of gravel. At full capacity, the plant is expected to burn 350 million to 500 million standard cubic feet of gas a day, delivered by pipeline from fields the state estimates are 25 to 90 miles away. Neither the gravel nor the gas pipeline is part of this lease. STAK must file separate applications for each, with its own public process.

The department wrote that the lease serves the state's best interest by creating a market for stranded North Slope natural gas, generating state revenue and adding to the borough's tax base.

The preliminary decision cited STAK's analysis of effects on air quality, wetlands, permafrost, caribou and subsistence resources. It agreed that mitigation would keep those effects within regulatory standards.

Some people objected to the project's scale and term. "The math is 60 permanent jobs, Alaskans locked in for 50 years. That's not an economic development," a downtown Anchorage resident said during public comment at the Anchorage Assembly's May 26 meeting.

In its responses to public comments, the division wrote that it does not conclude the project will be impact-free. The facility will be visible from the Dalton Highway at roughly a mile, and turbine and cooling noise could carry several miles. The division said STAK, not the state, carries the roughly $500 million construction cost.

The lease requires a $250,000 performance guaranty, rising to $1.25 million before gravel goes down.

People who submitted timely written comments may ask the commissioner to reconsider the decision by Nov. 30. That step is required before appealing to superior court.

The project still needs a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wetlands permit for fill at the pad and road, which the preliminary decision said will require federal environmental review.