The US Air Force plans to offer more than 3,000 acres of land on five of its military bases to private companies to build AI data centers.

In public contract documents and an unpublished press release seen by DefenseOne, the Air Force said that it was looking to use land at the Davis-Monthan base in Arizona, Edwards in California, Robins in Georgia., Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, and Arnold in Tennessee.

“AI is transforming the modern world, and these data centers are crucial for America to remain at the forefront of innovation,” Robert Moriarty, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary of installations, said in the unpublished release.

The request for proposal calls for facilities with more than 100MW of new load and at least $500 million in capital expenditures. As part of the deal, potential lessees "shall be required to make a cash payment to the government at lease execution in an amount equal to the government’s direct costs of each lease transaction, which is estimated not to exceed Two Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ($250,000.00)," the RFP states.

The move to open up Air Force land follows a Biden-era order to explore making DoD and DOE available to data center developers. The order was reworked by the Trump Administration, with the DOE announcing 16 potential sites in April.

Of those sites, the first four to be available to data center operators were announced in July, at Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and Savannah River Site.

However, turning to Air Force land has raised national security concerns.

“I have never heard of something like this before, where some of the public land was going to be leased to private companies to use,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told DefenseOne.

Edwards Air Force Base, where prototype aircraft projects are tested, accounts for 2,115 acres of the land up for lease, with seven potential sites on the base pinpointed.

“If you're letting a lot of people on the base, there is a lot of room for potential espionage, let alone sabotage or things like that,” Pettyjohn said. “It does seem to be purely commercial and transactional, and a part of the broader administration's policy towards blurring the lines between private and public which, in some ways, is what you see in authoritarian states like China.”

In a statement, the Air Force said the service will “ensure the proper security precautions are taken to protect the installation and its assets.”

Responses to the RFP are due by November 14, with winning lease proposals expected to be awarded by January 2026.