American technological giant Alphabet (GOOGL.O) said on Monday it signed the world’s first corporate agreement to buy power from multiple small modular reactors to meet electricity demand for artificial intelligence. The technology company’s agreement with Kairos Power aims to bring Kairos’ first small modular reactor online by 2030, followed by additional deployments through 2035. The companies did not disclose the financial terms or where the plants would be located in the United States.
The deal is the latest sign that big tech companies are increasingly interested in nuclear energy to meet their massive data center demands for AI technology. According to research firm Goldman Sachs, global energy consumption by data centers will double between now and 2026. That’s mainly because of the energy needed to run AI systems and keep their hardware cool.
The need for massive amounts of electricity is putting pressure on the sustainability commitments of many Silicon Valley companies. As a result, several of them have signed agreements with small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) developers to buy power for their data centers.
SMRs are a new type of nuclear reactor that can be built much faster and cheaper than conventional nuclear plants. They are designed to be made in a factory rather than on-site, and they can use waste from traditional nuclear plants to produce electricity. They also produce much less radioactive waste than conventional nuclear plants.
Google has been buying power for its data centers from renewable sources like wind and solar since 2019, but it wants to move toward using only carbon-free electricity by 2025. The data centers it uses to run AI technology are especially power-hungry, and the company said in its latest sustainability report that they are putting its progress toward reaching that target at risk.
To reach its net-zero goals, Google must build or have data centers near the SMRs when they come online. The company is expected to buy the electricity directly from the SMRs or the electric grid.
Although only three SMRs are operating in the United States, a revival of nuclear power is underway. Microsoft signed a deal last year to restart the Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania for 20 years. Amazon Web Services bought a 960-megawatt plant from Constellation Energy in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.
Kairos Power is a San Francisco-based SMR developer that hopes to be among the first to bring its first plant online by the early 2030s. The company’s “molten salt fast reactor” technology uses a unique cooling system to handle molten salts instead of water. The SMRs can be built much quicker than conventional nuclear plants, but the technology is still experimental, and there are still many questions about its feasibility. The multi-plant agreement with Google is a critical step in that process, and it will be essential to see if Kairos can demonstrate that its approach can work.
