ProjectsMeta committed to as much as 6.6 GW of nuclear power by 2035 in a set of January deals with Vistra, Oklo and TerraPower. Google has a 500 MW advanced nuclear order with Kairos Power. Amazon is financing up to 12 X-energy Xe-100 reactors in Washington state. None of these reactors is producing a watt for a data center today.
The bets are real anyway. The reasons come down to power, project structure and a regulator that has started to move faster. 🔌
Firm power is the bottleneck, and the grid is slow
Data center developers can build a campus faster than most utilities can connect it. Meta’s Prometheus AI supercluster in New Albany, Ohio, is expected to come online in 2026 and will draw at least 1 GW, according to Utility Dive. Much of Meta’s new nuclear supply is aimed at PJM, a 13-state grid that TechCrunch describes as already saturated with data centers.
Solar and wind do not close that gap alone. AI clusters run around the clock, and nuclear plants run at capacity factors above 90 percent. Kairos Power’s Hermes 2, a 50 MWe fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, shows the model. Under an August 2025 power purchase agreement, it will feed the TVA grid that supplies Google data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee, and Jackson County, Alabama, with operations scheduled for 2030, per World Nuclear News.
The numbers that matter:
Meta: up to 6.6 GW by 2035, split across existing plants, uprates and new advanced reactors
Google/Kairos: 500 MW of new advanced nuclear capacity by 2035
Hermes 2: 50 MWe, TVA grid, first power targeted for 2030
Meta/Vistra: more than 2.1 GW from Perry, Davis-Besse and Beaver Valley under 20-year agreements
Notice what is missing from that list: anything that delivers before 2030. Readers weighing these deals should ask which of them solves a power shortage this decade and which solves the one after. 🔍
Modular units let hyperscalers buy in increments and pay for the first one
A 1 GW reactor is a single large bet. An 80 MWe Xe-100 is a unit a tech company can fund, learn from and repeat. That is the real appeal of the small format. Each Xe-100 is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor running on TRISO fuel, and X-energy says its commitments with Dow, Amazon and Centrica add up to as many as 144 reactors worldwide, according to Canary Media.
Amazon sits at the center of the second project. Energy Northwest picked a joint venture of Aecon, Kiewit Nuclear Solutions and Black & Veatch to design and build the first four of 12 Xe-100 units at the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility near Richland. Amazon funds the work and holds rights to power from the first phase. Hyperscalers are paying for first-of-a-kind risk so their utility partners do not pass it to ratepayers.
Oklo applies the same logic at larger scale. Its deal with Meta targets a 1.2 GW Aurora Powerhouse campus in Pike County, Ohio, built incrementally and reaching full output by 2034, with first power as early as 2030, according to the American Nuclear Society. TerraPower’s piece is two 345 MW Natrium sodium fast reactors, with rights to up to six more.
What the buyers get:
Phased capacity that tracks data center build-out instead of arriving all at once
Direct financing roles that give them a say in schedule and siting
Repeat orders that bring unit costs down for the second and third plant
Colocation options that bypass some transmission upgrades
Not every dollar is firm, though. X-energy’s Cascade construction permit application is now expected in the first half of 2027, per its latest earnings call. That is a long wait for a project announced in 2024. 📅
The licensing path is finally shortening
Regulators are the part of the story that changed most in the last two years. Executive Order 14300, signed in May 2025, directs the NRC to decide on new reactor applications within 18 months. The agency also finished a review of TVA’s 300 MWe GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 at Clinch River in 14 months, four months early, according to Nuclear Engineering International. The NRC approved TerraPower’s Natrium construction permit in March.
Kairos already holds an NRC construction permit for Hermes 2, issued in 2024, and broke ground in April 2026 after a Kairos Power timeline that moved from permit to dirt in about 17 months. X-energy’s Dow project in Seadrift, Texas, four Xe-100 units, has a finding of no significant impact from the NRC and a final construction permit review expected to finish in the fourth quarter of 2026, with issuance anticipated in the first quarter of 2027.
Not everyone is on that track. Oklo’s original Aurora combined license application was denied by the NRC in January 2022 for missing information, and the company has since run a pre-application readiness assessment. Its first Aurora unit at Idaho National Laboratory is moving through the DOE Reactor Pilot Program, with commercial operation expected around 2028. Some of that status may be stale, so check the docket before relying on it. Want to know how this fits into the broader market picture? SMRbrief Pro has the answers.
Where each major project stands:
Kairos Hermes 2: NRC construction permit held, under construction since April 2026
X-energy/Dow Seadrift: permit decision expected Q1 2027
Energy Northwest Cascade: permit application expected first half of 2027
Oklo Aurora: DOE pilot track at INL, NRC combined license still to come
The financial logic holds only if these schedules do. If Hermes 2 reaches TVA’s grid in 2030 as planned, will Meta, Amazon and Google keep funding first units, or start demanding delivery guarantees? ⚡