Meta Signs Massive Nuclear Energy Deal

Meta revealed this morning a slew of new agreements with key players in the nuclear power industry, in an urgent bid to provide clean energy for its rapidly expanding data center empire.

The initial plan is to offtake over 2000 MW of power from nuclear power plants owned by Vistra energy in Ohio, assist with fast tracking two reactors from TerraPower, and send a pre-payment to Oklo for securing nuclear fuel and advancing the first stage of a project in Ohio.

Shares of VST and OKLO spiked about 10% and 20%, respectively, in the premarket.

As we’ve noted repeatedly over the past year, there never seems to be enough power for data centers, which is why today’s agreement is likely just the first step of many such deals. This latest plan unveils a roadmap for upwards of 6.6 GW of power, enough to power about 5 million American homes.

Instead, Meta will thankfully be using this new power for a higher calling: ensuring you get just the right ads on your Instagram feed coupled with more AI slop videos. Why pay for rent when you can have targeted advertising, sending you power bills sharply higher?

Impressively claiming that multiple gigawatts of nuclear energy isn’t enough, the 20-year power purchase agreement with Vistra will be used to finance over 400 MW of power up rates at existing nuclear plants in Ohio in Pennsylvania.

While keeping to the nuclear theme but executing a heavy shift from time-tested light water reactors to comparatively untested liquid sodium reactors, Meta has also signed deals for additional expansion plans with Oklo and TerraPower after the initial phase described above.

Bill Gates’ TerraPower will provide up to six additional reactor plants, which hold power peeking abilities of about 500 MW each, for Meta’s data centers. Oklo will also commence the development of their newly announced nuclear energy campus in Ohio with a goal of 1200 MW of sodium cooled reactor power production.

There seems to be an interesting split in the preference of technology between hyperscalers and the US government. The Department of Energy recently dumped $400 million each for light water reactor developers GE Vernova and Holtec for their 300 MW designs, while hyperscalers seem to be preferring light water only when they are already built and operating. Outside of the existing plants, the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta have signed major agreements with the more novel plant designers with reactors in the liquid sodium and molten salt categories.

Even taking in account the billions of dollars invested in advanced nuclear, only half the headaches are addressed by conquering the engineering headaches of designing and constructing these novel plants. Consistent operations with high uptime could take years to master, as evidenced by how many decades it took the large light water reactor fleet to reach their golden 90%+capacity factor.