AWS Walla Walla: 5.0 GW Sustainable AI Cluster (Project Basalt)

Status: Phased Construction / Giga-Scale Power Integration (April 2026)   |   Location: Multi-site campus across Wallula Gap and Walla Walla County

Project Overview

As of April 2026, Project Basalt has reached a critical milestone by securing a massive 5.0 GW power entitlement, positioning it as one of the most ambitious hyperscale infrastructure developments in North America. Technically, this cluster stands at the center of AWS’s broader “Basin and Range” infrastructure strategy, which is designed to align long-term compute expansion with abundant, resilient, and comparatively low-cost energy sources across the interior Northwest. The project leverages the Pacific Northwest’s extensive hydroelectric generation capacity while also integrating newly commissioned nuclear Small Modular Reactor (SMR) partnerships to provide stable baseload power for continuous AI workloads. Engineered specifically for next-generation high-density AI clusters, all new facilities at the site are being built around Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling, enabling significantly higher rack densities, improved thermal efficiency, and lower operational overhead than conventional air-cooled deployments. The campus is expected to function as a primary processing hub for AWS’s proprietary Inferentia 3 and Trainium 3 accelerators, supporting both large-scale model training and cost-optimized inference services for enterprise customers. Its geographic placement is equally strategic, taking advantage of the low-latency fiber corridor linking Seattle’s cloud backbone with rapidly expanding Idaho technology hubs. Together, these factors make Project Basalt a cornerstone asset in AWS’s race to scale sovereign, energy-secure, and AI-native cloud capacity.

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