Agreement is latest in series involving big tech companies needing power for data centres and AI
Federal energy provider Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has signed a nuclear power agreement with Google and Kairos Power, making it the first utility in the US to secure a binding deal with a next-generation small modular reactor (SMR) company.
The three companies said the collaboration will address growing US energy demand and reinforce the country’s leadership in advanced nuclear energy.
Kairos, which is developing Generation IV fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology, is planning deployment of a reactor at Oak Ridge in Tennessee that will supply 50 MW to TVA, which provides power to Google’s data centres in Alabama and Tennessee.
The companies said Kairos’s SMRs will not initially provide direct electricity to Google’s data centres, but will supply power to the grid and certify that the tech company added an equivalent amount of clean energy to offset power from dirtier sources.
“This collaboration is an important enabler to making advanced nuclear energy commercially competitive,” said Mike Laufer, Kairos Power’s chief executive and co-founder.
Kairos’s Hermes 2 nuclear plant design is the only advanced reactor approved for construction by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November 2024. The company is building a non-nuclear mockup of the plant known as the Engineering Test Unit (ETU 3.0) at its Oak Ridge, Tennessee, campus.
The US Department of Energy is investing about $300m (€256m) in Kairos’s Hermes project through its advanced reactor demonstration programme, as part of plans to accelerate the development of new nuclear technologies.
To speed up the delivery of energy to Google, Kairos Power will increase Hermes 2’s output from 28 MW to 50 MW generated by a single reactor, with operations scheduled to begin in 2030.
Laufer said the re-envisioned Hermes 2 “gets us closer to the commercial fleet sooner and could only be made possible by close collaboration with TVA and Google, and a supportive local community”.
In October Google announced it would back the construction of seven SMRs from Kairos Power, becoming the first tech company to commission new nuclear power plants to provide low-carbon electricity for its energy-hungry data centres.
Big Tech Goes Big On Nuclear
Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data centre energy, said: “This collaboration with TVA, Kairos Power and the Oak Ridge community will accelerate the deployment of innovative nuclear technologies and help support the needs of our growing digital economy while also bringing firm carbon-free energy to the electricity system.”
Technology giants are exploring nuclear power to meet their growing energy demand and sustainability goals.
Big Tech’s race to expand technologies like AI, which requires massive data centres that can require huge amounts of electricity at a single site, is driving up global energy consumption and raising fears about depleted power supplies.
The voracious energy needs of data centres have led to a rising number of preliminary power deals with nuclear energy. Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have all signed agreements to either deploy or buy nuclear energy.
Last week data centre developer and operator Equinix signed several advanced nuclear electricity deals, including power purchase agreements for nuclear energy and pre-ordering microreactors for its.
The US multinational said the agreements include plans to procure 500 MW of energy from California-based Oklo’s next-generation nuclear fission powerhouses. It also entered into a preorder agreement for 20 transportable microreactors from Radiant Nuclear, which is also based in California.
