Jefferson Lab to Lead $300+ Million High-Performance Data Facility Hub

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) as the lead for its new High Performance Data Facility Hub (HPDF). Jefferson Lab will partner with DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to form a joint project team led by Jefferson Lab. The HPDF will be a $300-500 million computing resource that will provide transformational capabilities for data analysis, networking, and storage for the nation’s research enterprise. It will provide researchers with tools, methods and technologies to maximize the scientific value of data.

The selection was announced this morning to a packed room of national, state, and local leaders. During the event, Governor Glenn Youngkin, U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, Congressman Bobby Scott, State Senator Monty Mason, Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones, and Jefferson Lab Director Stuart Henderson celebrated the collaboration that brought this project to Newport News.

To highlight the significance of the project, Senator Warner stated, “This is the single best technology investment in Hampton Roads ever.”

Vast amounts of research data are generated by major scientific user facilities, supercomputer simulations, and artificial intelligence tools every day. The mission of the HPDF will be to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by providing researchers with the ability to seamlessly access data from a wide range of sources and scientific facilities, even in real-time, applying state-of-the-art computational capabilities on a high-performance computing platform while in a secure environment.

The Jefferson Lab HPDF Hub will be housed in the Jefferson Lab Data Center Building. Construction of the new building will be funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Commonwealth has already provided $6 million in seed funding and has committed to provide $43 million to fund the construction of the data center building, suitable for outfitting by the DOE project, on Jefferson Lab’s central campus. The initial build-out will be a versatile, modular data center that will allow future upgrades and expansions without requiring hardware system shutdowns.

Initial project budget estimates and timelines project an approximate operational budget of $75 million per year, which begins ramping up in fiscal year 2028.

For more information on this project led by Jefferson Lab, visit hpdf.jlab.org.