TerraPower to launch nuclear project for AI data centers

Nuclear energy startup TerraPower plans to announce its first data center project later this year, with construction expected to begin in 2027. This initiative represents the company's second power plant, following its initial facility currently under construction in Wyoming. The announcement follows a January agreement in which Meta committed to purchasing eight of TerraPower's Natrium power plants, highlighting the tech sector's growing appetite for reliable, round-the-clock energy to fuel artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Powering AI data centers is notoriously difficult because graphic processing units (GPUs) cause power demands to spike and plunge rapidly during training and inference tasks. Traditional nuclear reactors are poorly suited for these fluctuations; they operate best at a constant maximum output, boasting a 92.5% capacity factor in the United States. Standard reactors can only adjust their output by about 5% per minute, while newer small modular reactors (SMRs) manage around 10% per minute. Because nuclear plants require massive capital expenditures, running them at reduced capacity to match fluctuating demand is financially impractical.

TerraPower addresses this issue with its 345-megawatt molten salt-cooled reactor design. Instead of throttling the reactor's fission process when power demand drops, the system continues splitting atoms at full capacity and stores the excess heat in a massive vat of molten sodium. When AI workloads spike and require immediate electricity, the plant draws from this thermal reservoir to generate steam and spin its turbines. This storage system allows the plant to run continuously at peak efficiency while absorbing the volatile load swings that have previously damaged natural gas turbines.

For AI infrastructure developers and data center operators, this technology offers a way to bypass the expensive battery installations normally required to smooth out power grid fluctuations. By combining the high capacity factor of nuclear energy with built-in thermal storage, TerraPower provides a stable, zero-carbon power source capable of handling intense AI workloads. This setup ensures that developers can scale up massive GPU clusters without risking grid instability or relying on fossil-fuel backups.