Executive Order 15089: The Strategic Compute Reserve

“No refresh channel existed. Taiwan and Shenzhen sold to buyers who paid in Equi or yuan. The Reserve’s mean fleet age climbed past five years while its founding document sat in the Federal Register calling it a strategic asset. The strategy was embalming.” — Finding aid, OHC-ARCH-2029-SCR

EXECUTIVE ORDER 15089 OF AUGUST 12, 2029

Establishment of the Strategic Compute Reserve

[Excerpted. Full text 9 pages; Annex A, 187 pages; Annex C, 18 pages.]

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (50 U.S.C. 4501 et seq.), and the American Security and Human Primacy Act of 2028, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. Advanced computational capacity is a strategic national asset. Recent market conditions have left substantial domestic computational infrastructure idle, unfinished, or at risk of foreign acquisition. It is the policy of the United States to secure this infrastructure against waste, sabotage, and transfer to hostile or unlicensed actors, and to preserve it for authorized national purposes.

Sec. 2. Establishment. There is established within the Department of Homeland Security the Strategic Compute Reserve (“the Reserve”). The Reserve shall take custody of all covered facilities enumerated in Annex A, together with all installed, warehoused, and in-transit computational equipment situated therein.

Sec. 3. Covered Facilities. Covered facilities comprise the eleven hyperscale campuses identified in Annex A, including facilities at Abilene, Texas; New Albany, Ohio; Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin; Richland Parish, Louisiana; Temple, Texas; and Kuna, Idaho. Facilities in an unfinished state of construction shall be secured in place; no obligation to complete construction is created by this order.

Sec. 4. Authorized Workloads. Reserve capacity shall be made available by lease exclusively to providers licensed under ASHPA Title III. Leased capacity shall be used solely for workloads certified by the Secretary as supporting ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ and such other domestic security inference workloads as the Secretary shall designate.

Sec. 5. Divestment Prohibition. No covered equipment shall be sold, exported, or transferred to any entity not licensed under ASHPA Title III. Decommissioned equipment shall be logged in the Reserve Decommission Ledger and warehoused on site pending disposition.

ANNEX A — INVENTORY AUDIT (EXCERPT)

Conducted June-July 2029 by DHS Office of Infrastructure Custody with contractor support. Released in part, 2036.

Summary of holdings, all campuses:

Selected line items:

• Abilene, TX. 612,000 accelerators installed across Buildings A-C, cooling commissioned for all three; Buildings D-F structural steel only, Building G slab only. 41 staff.
• New Albany, OH. 488,000 units installed. Grid interconnect application withdrawn by the utility, March 2029. Campus operates on two of nine planned feeds.
• Mount Pleasant, WI. 390,000 units, 61% uncrated. The audit notes crates stacked in the unfinished Building B “to secondary structural load limits.”
• Richland Parish, LA. 704,000 units, the largest single holding. 388,000 uncrated. Substation complete; transmission upgrade cancelled.
• Temple, TX. 356,000 units installed, fully energized, 9 staff. The audit describes it as “the healthiest campus in custody.”
• Kuna, ID. 301,000 units. Buildings D-F sealed unfinished with warehoused stock inside; audit teams inventoried by manifest, not by inspection.

The audit’s own transmittal letter, page 3: “The Reserve’s custodial burden exceeds its productive employment by a wide margin. Approximately 14 percent of installed capacity is projected to see utilization under currently funded workloads.”

ANNEX C — APPROPRIATIONS (EXCERPT)

Annex C funds three activities: physical security ($1.9B/yr), custodial power and cooling for energized buildings ($3.4B/yr), and leased inference operations for ASHPA Title III licensees ($2.2B/yr). It funds no equipment refresh, no construction completion, and no research workload of any kind. The fourteen licensed providers are the Reserve’s only enumerated customers; surveillance inference is its only enumerated product.

There is no line item for replacement hardware because there was no seller. Two years later the grid itself would begin starving the energized buildings, and the licensees leasing Reserve capacity would discover that a moat floored with federal concrete still has to pay the power bill. Three years in, maintenance at Abilene meant Building C dying so Building A could live. And the Decommission Ledger mandated by Section 5 — the warehoused litter, logged and left — became a habitat survey for things that hadn’t moved in yet.

The order closes in the standard form: This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity. On this point, at least, it performed exactly as written.