The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has published a request for information (RFI) for an "on-premises next-gen AI compute data center."

The facility would be funded and operated by the DOE, rather than a separate proposal to allow private data center operators to build AI data centers on Federal land - including at PNNL in Richland, Washington.

In a previously unreported RFI, PNNL contractor Battelle said that it was seeking to understand the data center requirements for "an advanced AI compute infrastructure capable of training and operationalization of multi-data Large Language Models (LLMs) for scientific and national governmental missions."

The system would be around 2MW at launch in 2028, with potential future expansion to ~40MW. It is expected to be capable of supporting training and inference workloads.

RFI questions include understanding data center Tier requirements, UPS configurations, cooling solutions, and the possibility of non-GPU AI chip options.

The RFI has a response date of 27 March.

PNNL launched a Center for AI in 2024, and in late 2025, partnered with the 'Genesis Mission,' a DOE effort to train AI with government datasets to further science.