Meta revealed on Friday that it has struck deals with three nuclear energy companies to power its data centres, as the social media giant steps up its ambitions in AI, including the pursuit of superintelligence.
The agreements with nuclear power companies Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo, one of whose biggest investors is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are expected to provide the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with 6.6 gigawatts of power by 2035. data centers,
The deal positions Meta as a significant buyer of nuclear power, surpassing Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and adds another element to the AI race.
Data centers have become increasingly important in recent years, especially as generative and agentic AI models require enormous amounts of energy for training and inference. New deals could bring Meta closer to its goal building superintendenceSystems that surpass human performance in most cognitive tasks.
With Vistara, Meta signed a 20-year power purchase agreement to purchase more than 2,600 MW of power from nuclear stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio operated by Vistara and TerraPower. Meanwhile, META will assist Oklo’s development of 1.2 gigawatts of nuclear power from Oklo’s complex in Pike County, Ohio. META will also fund TerraPower’s development of two Natrium advanced reactor units through 2032, with the right to generate more energy from six future units.
lack of resources
deals follow Meta’s agreement with Constellation Energy The purchase of 1,100 megawatts from the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois last year will begin next year. The deals will also help power projects like Meta’s Prometheus supercluster, a 1-gigawatt AI data center being built in New Albany, Ohio.
The need to capture ever-increasing amounts of power has become a top priority for AI hyperscalers, including Meta, according to Chirag Shah, a professor at the School of Information at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Generative and agentic AI-powered systems require increasingly more resources such as ai chipsData centers, power, cooling and networking infrastructure.
“Our consumption is increasing, and all these chips and data centers are just coming left and right,” Shah said. “All these chips we’re running… they consume a ton of power, and we’re running out of normal means of getting that power from the normal grid.”
Because they cannot get enough electricity from the existing power grid, Meta and other AI vendors, such as Google and Microsoft, are partnering with nuclear companies as an alternative source of energy. Google has signed nuclear agreements with nuclear power companies Kairos Power and NextEra Energy. Microsoft has reached a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, which partially melted in 1979.
Energy and electricity are not the only limited resources in the AI market.
Many are also concerned about depleting water sources for cooling data centers.
“All of these things are costing planet Earth a lot, but right now, there’s nothing stopping them from making these deals and prioritizing things like securing things, running their data centers,” Shah said.
These deals allow Metra to demonstrate its progress toward cleaner forms of energy, Shah said. While nuclear power has been on hold for decades, it is slowly making a comeback, partly because many consider it cleaner than coal, oil and natural gas plants. Nevertheless, many observers still consider nuclear power potentially dangerous because of the problem of storage and disposal of radioactive materials.
Public opinion and results
However, David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group, said Meta’s nuclear power initiative demonstrates the scope of its influence, ambition and potential to drive the development of advanced AI technology and shape public opinion about the social media giant.
“They are signaling to equity markets that they are in a strong position here,” Nicholson said. Meta’s aggression on the lightning front could also inspire other hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft to make more lightning deals of their own.
However, Meta’s move toward nuclear power should be examined with a critical eye, as it has made agreements for projects that have not yet been realized, Nicholson said.
For example, some of the projects mentioned have not yet been built, and the timetable appears to be so long – with a completion date of around 2035 for all Natrium units – that it suggests Meta could expand itself.
Nicholson said consumers will need to keep an eye on whether these massive deals affect their energy bills.
“If you can negotiate a fixed price with someone like Meta, everyone else has to pay more,” he said. “We have to follow this closely because the big industrial players are given huge incentives to behave very badly.”
Enterprises eyeing the AI market may be best off taking a cautious approach, Nicholson added.
“Those who are making big bets, and they are Open AI, Nvidias, hyperscale cloud providers – some of those bets are going to pay off like never before, and others are going to fail spectacularly,” he said.
