TerraPower to break ground on first data centre nuclear project in 2027
What's the deal? TerraPower plans to announce its first data centre project this year, according to Bloomberg. The Bill Gates-founded startup expects to break ground in 2027 on what would be its second power plant, following its first, already under construction in Wyoming.
Why now? Nuclear power startups are pitching themselves as the answer to AI data centres' hunger for round-the-clock electricity. TerraPower declined to name its customer, though in January it announced that Meta had agreed to buy eight of its Natrium plants.
What's the endgame? TerraPower designed its 345-megawatt molten salt-cooled reactor to ramp up and down quickly — a rarity for nuclear. Instead of dialling reactor output, it keeps splitting atoms and stores the extra heat in a vat of molten sodium, then taps that reservoir to spin turbines when demand spikes.
The design gives it energy storage baked in, an advantage over rivals. It pairs nuclear's high capacity factor with storage that suits both a renewable-heavy grid and the swinging loads of a data centre.
What could go wrong? Nuclear carries the highest capital expenditures of any generating technology. Startups are betting that mass-producing small modular reactors (SMRs) will bring costs down, but that is unproven — and any payoff could take a decade or more.
Data centre loads are the core challenge. GPUs training AI or answering prompts cause power draw to sink and soar so sharply that natural gas turbines have broken under the strain, forcing operators to add costly banks of batteries to smooth the curve.
Existing reactors run best at full tilt — US plants generate at maximum power 92.5% of the time — but ramp slowly, adjusting only about 5% of rated output per minute, according to the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). SMRs can react roughly twice as fast, per NLR, yet running at reduced capacity still makes it hard to earn a return.
The signal: TerraPower originally built for intermittent wind and solar, but data centres are similarly volatile — just on the other side of the meter. By keeping its expensive equipment working even when demand dips, the startup positions storage as the edge in the race to power AI.
Read more: TechCrunch
Image credit: Nuclear Regulatory Commission from US (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
