The Air Force wants to put AI data centers on Alaska military land — and the three sites tell three very different stories

The Air Force is asking private developers to propose commercial artificial intelligence data centers on underused military land in Alaska, with potential sites at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Eielson Air Force Base south of Fairbanks, and Clear Space Force Station in the Interior. Proposals are due June 29, and the federal government is offering long-term ground leases in exchange for cash rent — not commitments to buy data-center services or power.

The framework is open-ended. There's no minimum or maximum megawatt target. Developers can propose nuclear power, including small modular reactors or microreactors, as long as any onsite generation complies with state and local rules and coordinates with the Alaska Energy Authority and Railbelt operators. What the Air Force does require is detail: size, capacity, construction schedule, utility interconnections, water management, noise and light mitigation, and any onsite generation.

The three Alaska sites would not all be equally easy to build on.

JBER is the most constrained. The three remaining parcels at the Anchorage base — totaling roughly 266 acres near Boniface Gate, the Richardson Highway corridor, and Arctic Valley Road — all have insufficient power for an AI data center, even where Chugach Electric infrastructure runs nearby. One site sits beside a restricted-use landfill; another may contain unexploded ordnance from more than 80 years of military training and would likely draw public, tribal, and resource-agency concern because it sits between housing and recreation areas. The Air Force also flagged a short-term Alaska LNG shortage as a complicating factor for any gas-fired backup.

Eielson is in between — five parcels totaling about 4,400 acres, pointing toward Golden Valley Electric Association power along the Old Richardson and Richardson highways. One Eielson parcel comes with an unexpected asset: the former Ben Eielson Junior/Senior High School, a roughly 100,000-square-foot building unoccupied since 2024. Architectural plans, mechanical and electrical drawings, and a 2018 facility condition assessment are all in the lease package — though the documents describe it as an existing structure, not a designed data-center shell. The bigger Eielson concern is PFAS contamination: a June 2 Q&A flagged that the Eielson plume is spreading and that several of the listed sites are within or near it.

Clear stands out. The Space Force station offers four parcels totaling about 4,769 acres — the largest land package among the three installations, and the only location where the documents give a specific nearby grid-capacity figure. GVEA told the Air Force that the Clear switching station has roughly 50 megawatts of additional capacity, subject to further analysis. Clear also has a decommissioned coal plant on site with 22.5 megawatts of legacy generator equipment (though the documents don't say it's operable), and what may be the most valuable physical feature in the entire package: "virtually unlimited groundwater," with an aquifer that has demonstrated the capacity to sustain about 18 million gallons per day of pumping. Water is the second-biggest constraint on AI data centers nationally, after power, and Clear has it.

Clear is not without environmental complications. Three of the four parcels include legacy contamination sites — old gravel pits, landfills, a decommissioned DDT drum dump, an active monofill. Part of one parcel near the Healy Terrace has high potential for undiscovered archaeological sites. But the combination of land access along the Parks Highway and Alaska Railroad, GVEA capacity, and groundwater is exactly the package an AI-data-center developer looking north would want to see.

The solicitation does not commit anyone to building anything. The Air Force can reject proposals, cancel the solicitation, or negotiate without signing a lease. What Alaska communities will want to watch as proposals come in: where developers concentrate acreage, how much power they propose to draw or generate, whether nuclear or other onsite generation shows up in bids, and how they plan to handle cooling water — particularly at Clear, where the groundwater itself is the asset that brought them north.