TerraPower Targets AI Data Centers With Advanced Nuclear Reactor

TerraPower plans to announce its first AI data center power project in 2026, with construction expected to break ground in 2027, according to TechCrunch. The facility would be the company's second Natrium nuclear plant, following the first unit already under construction in Wyoming.

The announcement moves TerraPower closer to pairing advanced nuclear reactors with the massive power demands of AI workloads. In January 2026, Meta agreed to buy eight Natrium plants, providing funding that supports development of two new units, per Meta's announcement. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers are separately exploring Natrium deployments in the Rocky Mountain region and Texas to support growing power needs, under an agreement announced in January 2025.

TerraPower's Natrium reactor design tackles a core engineering challenge in matching nuclear generation to data center power needs. U.S. nuclear reactors operate at maximum power 92.5% of the time, the highest reliability of any power plant type, according to the Department of Energy. That consistency is a strength for steady, around-the-clock power but a limitation when demand fluctuates. Existing nuclear reactors can ramp output up or down by only about 5% of their full capacity per minute. Small modular reactors improve on that figure to roughly 10% per minute.

Natrium takes a different approach. The reactor continuously splits atoms at full power and stores excess heat in a large tank of molten salt. That stored heat can be tapped when power demand spikes, which decouples generation from output. Instead of throttling the reactor up and down, the plant buffers thermal energy and releases it as needed. For data center operators whose AI workloads can surge and recede over hours, that thermal storage layer is the architecture's most relevant feature.

The economic picture is more sobering. Nuclear power has the highest upfront capital costs of any electricity generating technology. TerraPower's proposed Natrium plant is projected to cost $9.4 billion for 345 megawatts of electrical power, per The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. That works out to roughly $27,000 per kilowatt of installed capacity, about ten times the cost of combined-cycle gas turbines. Whether molten salt energy storage and load-following capability can offset that cost premium at scale is the question that will determine whether Natrium becomes a standard data center energy architecture or a niche deployment subsidized by the largest tech companies.

TerraPower is also expanding geographically. The company announced the launch of TerraPower UK and the start of Generic Design Assessment Step 1 for the Natrium reactor on June 16, from its Bellevue, Washington headquarters, per TerraPower's news page. The GDA process is the UK's regulatory pathway for new reactor designs, and entering Step 1 signals intent to pursue deployment in Britain, though regulatory approval and construction there remain years away.

The pipeline now spans three distinct customer categories. Meta's eight-plant commitment represents demand from the largest tech companies for carbon-free power at scale. The Sabey Data Centers partnership targets colocation and wholesale data center capacity in the Rocky Mountain corridor and Texas. And the forthcoming AI data center project, expected to break ground in 2027, would pair a Natrium unit directly with compute infrastructure.

The broader context here is a power supply crunch that has hardened from speculation into board-level concern across the industry. AI training clusters now draw tens to hundreds of megawatts per site, and inference capacity is scaling in fragmented bursts as enterprises deploy models. The grid interconnection queue in major U.S. markets has stretched to multi-year delays, pushing operators toward on-site or dedicated generation. Nuclear, with its high reliability and zero operational carbon emissions, fits the procurement criteria that hyperscalers have published. The unresolved variable is cost and construction timeline: no advanced nuclear reactor has yet completed a commercial build in the United States.

TerraPower's Wyoming plant, under construction after receiving regulatory approval earlier in 2026, per TechCrunch, will be the first real-world test of whether Natrium's molten salt architecture can be delivered on budget and schedule. Until that plant produces power, every subsequent project announcement, including the AI data center plan, rests on an unproven construction and commissioning track record.

What the AI data center project does signal is that TerraPower is positioning Natrium not just as a grid supplier but as a dedicated energy asset for compute infrastructure. If the molten salt storage performs as designed, the architecture could let a data center operator draw variable power from a constant-output reactor without stressing the nuclear island or drawing peak load from the grid. That is a meaningful coupling for facilities running bursty inference workloads alongside steady-state training jobs.

The $9.4 billion cost figure for 345 MWe, combined with the capital intensity of nuclear more broadly, means early deployments will almost certainly require offtake commitments from well-capitalized buyers. Meta's eight-plant agreement is the clearest example. Whether that model extends to mid-tier data center operators, or whether Natrium remains a tool for the largest hyperscalers, depends on cost curves that will not become clear until the Wyoming plant is operational.