Tech giants have signed more nuclear power in 18 months than the US did in 20 years

The largest technology companies in the country have spent the past two years converting years of talk about nuclear-powered data centers into signed contracts, and the pace of that dealmaking has surprised even people who track the power industry for a living. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have each committed to buying gigawatt-scale amounts of nuclear electricity since 2024, a shift driven almost entirely by the electricity demands of artificial intelligence.

Why AI Data Centers Are Turning to Reactors

Nuclear power already supplies roughly 18% of the country’s electricity, ranking second only to natural gas among single power sources, and its appeal to data center operators comes down to reliability and long-run cost, according to the Christian Science Monitor. About six uranium fuel pellets, costing roughly $25 apiece, can power an average American household for a full year once burned in a reactor. Generating that same year of electricity from coal would require about 12,000 pounds of fuel costing $300 to $1,300, while natural gas would require 78,000 cubic feet costing anywhere from $212 wholesale to $1,500 at residential retail rates. For a data center campus that needs power running continuously around the clock, that combination of price stability and constant output is difficult for wind, solar or gas to match on their own.

The Specific Deals Reshaping the Grid

The scale of the recent commitments is visible in the individual contracts each company has signed. Meta announced in January 2026 that it would buy more than 6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity through three separate agreements, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the deals: a 20-year purchase of 2.1 gigawatts from Vistra’s existing Perry and Davis-Besse reactors in Ohio, 1.2 gigawatts from small modular reactor startup Oklo aiming to begin supplying power as early as 2030, and an initial 690 megawatts from Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, with rights to expand that agreement to 2.8 gigawatts. Those deals stemmed from a request for proposals Meta issued in December 2024 seeking one to four gigawatts of new capacity by the early 2030s. Much of that new power is set to flow through PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator covering 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states that has become increasingly saturated with data center demand, which is one reason Meta and its peers went looking for new generation capacity rather than simply buying more electricity from the existing grid.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google have moved on parallel tracks. Microsoft signed a $16 billion, 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy to help restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, Amazon has committed more than $1.15 billion to reactor developers and data-center-adjacent nuclear campuses, and Google has struck a deal with Kairos Power to develop 500 megawatts of small modular reactors, the Monitor reported. Industry trackers describe the resulting wave, which spans at least 13 separate agreements since 2024, as the largest and fastest corporate nuclear procurement effort in the sector’s history, even if no single dataset ties every announcement to one precise multi-decade comparison.

A Federal Push Running in Parallel

The private dealmaking is unfolding alongside a separate federal effort to revive the reactor supply chain itself. In June 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $17.5 billion in conditional loans to help finance long-lead components for 10 large Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at five sites nationwide, a program the department says could accelerate construction timelines by up to three years. Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed the loans as central to reviving a domestic supply chain capable of building large-scale commercial reactors again, tying the effort to a Trump administration goal of having 10 new large reactors under construction with completed designs by 2030. The department has separately said it wants to roughly quadruple total U.S. nuclear output by 2050, a target that would require both the utility-scale reactors the DOE loans are meant to support and the wave of smaller, faster-to-build reactors the tech industry is betting on.

The Bottlenecks That Could Slow the Buildout

None of that momentum eliminates the practical obstacles still standing in front of these projects. Small modular reactors typically cost between $1 billion and $6 billion per unit, and researchers say the industry will likely need to build at least 30 identical units, and possibly several hundred, before mass production drives the cost per megawatt down to competitive levels. The country also still has no permanent site for spent nuclear fuel; efforts to finalize Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a storage location remain stalled by bipartisan political opposition, leaving the government to pay private companies roughly $800 million a year to store waste on-site at existing plants instead. Public opinion complicates siting further in an unexpected direction: a Gallup poll cited by the Monitor found 71% of Americans oppose new data center construction in their own community over water and electricity concerns, compared with only 53% who oppose a new nuclear plant nearby, meaning the reactors backing this buildout may face less local resistance than the data centers they are built to power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has responded by moving to approve some small modular reactor designs in 18 months or less, though regulators say that faster timeline has not come at the expense of safety reviews.

Only two next-generation small reactors are currently under construction in the country, one from TerraPower near Kemmerer, Wyoming, and one from Kairos Power in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, meaning nearly all of the gigawatt totals attached to the tech industry’s contracts still describe capacity that exists on paper rather than power already reaching a data center. That gap between signed contracts and operating reactors is likely to persist for years, since even the fastest-moving small modular reactor developers are not targeting first power delivery until 2030 at the earliest.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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