COLUMBIA — The University of Missouri broke ground Wednesday on an energy research center that aims to find sustainable solutions to national energy issues.
The university calls the Payne Energy Innovation Center a state-of-the-art facility and said it will connect multi-disciplinary faculty members, students and researchers in a way no other building on campus does.
The center aims to find ways to make technology that uses power and water more sustainable and efficient for people in Missouri and around the world.
The center is named after David Payne, an MU graduate who is the chair of St. Louis electrical contracting company PayneCrest Electric. Payne donated $50 million to the MU College of Engineering, which MU said is the largest single investment in a school or college in the university's history.
The UM System Board of Curators approved the project in June 2025, and the facility is expected to open north of Lafferre Hall in July 2028.
The university shared renderings of the Payne Energy Innovation Center, which can be viewed on MU's YouTube channel, at the groundbreaking.
The 116,000-square-foot facility will include a shared instrumentation suite, communal spaces for networking and mentorship, shared student office space, lab support space, a custom lab and a data lab, according to the university.
"I hope that the Payne Innovation Center becomes a place where research pushes boundaries, big ideas are explored and real world problems are solved," Payne said at the event.
Marisa Chrysochoou, dean of the College of Engineering, said that as artificial intelligence usage expands, finding ways to cool data centers becomes a higher priority.
"We know that the energy consumption associated with AI is increasing, so we need to find new ways to generate power that do not bring that cost over to the consumer, so we need research that will help us make energy more efficient," Chrysochoou said. "We also need to find ways to cool the data centers without using any water, and actually, a lot of researches are making advancements towards that."
UM System President Mun Choi spoke at the groundbreaking and expressed his gratitude to the curators, members of the state legislature and David Payne for bringing the facility to life.
"Here we are going to bring together expertise from so many different disciplines to tackle the most important problems in energy," Choi said.
The Missouri General Assembly allocated $2 million toward the center in the fiscal year 2027 budget, but Gov. Mike Kehoe froze that funding from being used, a move he can later reverse if revenue allows.
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