Secretary of Energy Chris Wright will travel to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on Friday to tour nuclear facilities and take part in a summit on the future of artificial intelligence development in the United States.
Wright’s visit to Oak Ridge, one of the original sites of the Manhattan Project, comes after he spent Monday at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Lab touring its highly secure supercomputing and plutonium facilities. At Oak Ridge, Wright will tour the site’s supercomputer and Y-12, a facility that produces and stores enriched uranium.
GOP Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, the chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee, will be one of several lawmakers hosting Wright.
“Oak Ridge and East Tennessee are at the forefront of developing groundbreaking new technologies such as AI, revitalizing our defense industrial base, and working to deliver on President Trump’s and Secretary Wright’s agenda to unleash American-made energy by expanding new nuclear power and technologies,” Fleischmann told The Daily Wire, adding that such advancements “are essential to our national security, economic prosperity, and powering our nation through the 21st Century.”
Wright’s visit to the Tennessee nuclear site comes as the administration prioritizes AI research and development to outperform U.S. adversaries like China. Wright will meet with OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, on Friday and take part in a virtual summit described as a “1,000 Scientist AI Jam Session,” according to an Oak Ridge spokesman.
The summit is a “first-of-its-kind event being co-hosted by OpenAI and nine of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs to explore how AI can accelerate scientific discovery,” the spokesman told The Daily Wire. “Participants will have access to leading frontier AI models to test research applications, evaluate model responses, and help improve future AI systems. Secretary Wright and Mr. Brockman will give remarks and visit with participating Oak Ridge scientists.”
The participating national labs are Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven, Idaho, Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Princeton Plasma Physics.
Wright’s visits to Oak Ridge and Los Alamos emphasize the administration’s view of the importance of nuclear power. In an order signed on his first day as Energy Secretary, Wright said that the Trump administration aims to spark an “American nuclear renaissance” and that the United States should lead the “commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy.”
That energy will be needed to power the U.S. development of energy-intensive AI models. In a video of his tour of Los Alamos, the secretary described the AI race as the “next Manhattan Project,” a reference to the U.S. research program that developed the atomic bomb during the Second World War.
More than 70 years ago, the Manhattan Project brought together the world’s greatest scientists and engineers here in Los Alamos for a patriotic effort that changed the world.
The next Manhattan Project has arrived and with @POTUS leadership, we will win this critical race. pic.twitter.com/E40rNzKgJJ
— Secretary Chris Wright (@SecretaryWright) February 26, 2025
