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Google, Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority have signed a nuclear power deal as utilities and technology companies turn to the clean energy source for the artificial intelligence revolution.
Kairos, a small modular reactor company, is building a reactor in Tennessee that will supply 50MW to federal utility TVA, which provides power to Google’s data centres in Alabama and Tennessee.
The companies said that Kairos’s small modular reactors will not initially provide direct electricity to Google’s data centres, but would give Google energy attribution certificates showing that it had added an equivalent amount of clean energy to offset power from dirtier sources like natural gas.
The agreements will make TVA the first US utility to agree to buy electricity from an advanced generation IV reactor, signalling confidence in the potential of the new type of plants. The reactors offer improved fuel efficiency and produce less waste than available nuclear technologies.
Technology companies are increasingly turning to nuclear to meet power demand for their energy-intensive data centres and respond to pressure to reduce carbon emissions from their AI operations.
Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all struck deals with nuclear companies, and the sector wants to secure more firm commitments to ensure continued funding and guaranteed demand for the technology.
Last week data centre operator Equinix signed a 500MW procurement deal with Oklo and pre-ordered 20 reactors from Radiant Nuclear.
“This collaboration is an important enabler to making advanced nuclear energy commercially competitive,” said Mike Laufer, Kairos Power’s chief executive and co-founder.
Small modular reactors are nuclear reactors that generate less than 300MW, which proponents say can be produced en masse and be easily transported.
Kairos’s Hermes 2 design is cooled by molten fluoride salt and was approved for construction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November 2024.
The US Department of Energy is investing about $300mn in Kairos’s Hermes project through its Advanced Reactor Demonstration programme, as part of a push to accelerate the development of new nuclear technologies. The US has brought only three reactors online in the past 20 years.
It is the first implementation of an agreement Google and Kairos signed last year for 500MW of energy. Kairos hopes to have its first commercial reactor online by 2030 and additional reactors by 2035.
Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data centre energy, said the agreement would “help support the needs of our growing digital economy while also bringing firm carbon-free energy to the electricity system”.
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