NETL’s Computational Science & Engineering Center data center, Morgantown, West Virginia

The National Energy Technology Laboratory is building a 14,000-square-foot Computational Science and Engineering Center, a federal data center for its research supercomputers, on its Morgantown campus in Monongalia County, West Virginia. The lab calls it its largest construction project in more than a decade. The project is under construction and is funded in part by $150 million in Inflation Reduction Act money spread across NETL's three sites.

The center will hold a server hall for NETL's computing systems, including current and future generations of its Joule supercomputer, a Wafer-Scale Engine chip system made by Cerebras Systems, and a visualization center. It will consolidate the Morgantown campus's data centers into one building so older, less efficient space can be shut down. Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured the site under construction in June 2025.

The campus could also host something much larger. The Department of Energy has listed NETL's Morgantown site among 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, citing about 50 acres with access to a transmission line and substation, and its nearness to West Virginia University. In July 2025 DOE picked its first four sites, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Paducah and Savannah River, and said it was still evaluating others; NETL was not among them. "You will see data centers built on national lab property," Wright said in Morgantown.

Around Morgantown the debate is about state law. House Bill 2014, passed in 2025, created a certified microgrid program that exempts high-impact data centers from county and municipal zoning, noise rules and local building permits. "I think a lot of the counties had realized and noticed the changes that occurred, and took a lot of our local control away," said Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora. The House voted down an amendment from Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, that would have required developers to disclose water use, 23-70 in February 2026.

Whether a private AI data center comes to the Morgantown campus depends on the Department of Energy, which said it would issue site-specific solicitations and could add more sites later. No solicitation naming Morgantown has been announced.