A startup wants to pull nuclear reactors out of retired Navy submarines to power AI data centers

As the artificial intelligence boom drives an unprecedented hunger for electricity, one company has floated an idea that sounds almost improbable: take the nuclear reactors out of decommissioned Navy warships and use them to run power-hungry data centers on land. Rather than building a new reactor from scratch or waiting years for a next-generation small modular design, the plan would repurpose proven military hardware that has already spent years powering ships at sea. The proposal is still just that, a pitch to the federal government, but it captures how far the industry is willing to stretch to find always-on power.

The concept sits at the intersection of two of the decade’s biggest stories, the explosive energy demand of AI computing and the search for carbon-free electricity that does not depend on the weather. It also runs headfirst into a regulatory system that was never designed to license a Navy reactor for civilian use.

The CoreHeld proposal to the Department of Energy

The company behind the plan is a Texas-based firm that has sent a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy to repurpose two retired Navy reactors, an approach detailed by Tom’s Hardware. The company is seeking a federal loan guarantee to underwrite the effort, a financing mechanism the government uses to lower the risk for lenders backing large energy projects. Central to the pitch is the idea that the reactors would supply steady, round-the-clock power to an AI data center campus rather than feed the broader grid.

If it went forward, the project would mark a genuine first. The plan would represent the first time a military reactor has been repurposed for civilian use, a distinction noted in reporting on the proposal by Interesting Engineering. Naval reactors have powered submarines and aircraft carriers for decades with a strong safety record, but they have always operated inside a military framework, not the civilian regulatory system.

The power and cost math

The scale the company describes is substantial. Two repurposed reactors would be aimed at delivering roughly 450 to 520 megawatts of power, enough to anchor a large data center campus on their own. That output places the project in the range of a mid-sized power plant, dedicated to a single industrial customer rather than distributed across a region.

The financial case rests on comparison. The firm estimates the total project would cost between $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion, or roughly $1 million to $4 million per megawatt, a range reported by The Outpost. The pitch is that even at those figures, repurposing existing reactors would cost a fraction of building an entirely new nuclear plant or fielding the small modular reactors that technology giants have been backing. Whether those numbers hold up under scrutiny is one of the central questions any federal review would have to answer.

Why licensing is the real obstacle

The hardest part of the plan is not engineering but law. Naval reactors typically run on highly enriched uranium and are built around sealed-core designs that do not map cleanly onto the civilian licensing rules enforced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The fuel form, the security and safeguards model, the refueling plan, and the eventual waste pathway would all have to be reconciled with a regulatory playbook written for commercial power reactors, a mismatch highlighted in coverage of the idea by Times Square Chronicles. Highly enriched uranium in particular raises security and nonproliferation concerns that civilian plants are specifically designed to avoid.

Those hurdles mean that even a technically sound reactor could stall for years in licensing, and there is no guarantee regulators would clear a design that originated in the classified world of naval propulsion. The proposal effectively asks the federal government to help pioneer an entirely new category of civilian nuclear asset, which is a heavier lift than simply financing another power plant.

The AI-driven scramble for firm power

The proposal only makes sense against the backdrop of soaring data center demand. As AI workloads multiply, operators are hunting for large blocks of reliable, carbon-free electricity that can run continuously, and the search has pushed developers toward nuclear power in forms that would have seemed exotic a few years ago. The idea of tapping retired warship reactors has entered the conversation precisely because regions with clustered AI data centers are struggling to secure always-on power, a dynamic described in reporting by MITechNews.

For all its novelty, the plan remains a proposal awaiting a federal response, not a project under construction. It illustrates both the desperation and the creativity of an industry racing to power its computing ambitions, and it puts a concrete price and timeline on an idea that would reuse some of the most capable machines the U.S. military ever built. Whether regulators, financiers, and the public are prepared to see a submarine reactor humming beside a server farm is the test this pitch now faces.

This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed before publication.

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