The Financial Times reportson the growing appeal of small modular nuclear reactors to AI data centers.

Last week, Meta announced agree­ments with two SMR start-ups. It is pre­pay­ing for power from up to eight of Ter­ra­Power’s Natrium react­ors and up to 16 of Oklo’s Aurora react­ors. This will make it one of the biggest cor­por­ate buy­ers of nuc­lear energy. Amazon, Google and other data centre developers have also signed deals with SMR start-ups includ­ing NuS­cale, X-energy and Kairos Power. Com­bined, I cal­cu­late that these deals will provide less than four gigawatts of power by 2030. This is just a small frac­tion of the 20GW demand that US data centres could need by 2030.

For tech giants con­sum­ing as much power as small coun­tries, nuc­lear is the best route for the cre­ation of large-scale clean elec­tri­city. Wind and solar projects may be quicker to build indi­vidu­ally, but build­ing many sim­ul­tan­eously is harder. Nuc­lear is also bet­ter able to avoid land, trans­mis­sion and grid con­nec­tion bot­tle­necks. And a high grid pen­et­ra­tion of nuc­lear power is less com­plex and costly to man­age than a high pen­et­ra­tion of wind and solar farms. These are long-term plans. Deals with SMR developers for over 20GW of power post-2030 far out­weigh the size of deals for power pre-2030.