Meta on Friday expanded its footprint in nuclear energy, announcing a two-decade power deal with several existing plants and investments in companies building small modular reactors.
Meta said the deals with Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower could unlock up to 6.6 gigawatts of clean energy by 2035 for its artificial intelligence data centers. That’s roughly equivalent to the total capacity of northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley,” the largest hub in the world.
The announcement reflects how hyperscalers’ skyrocketing demand for power has been a boon for the nuclear sector, which energy analysts called a dying industry as recently as 2021. The largest tech companies are all investing in nuclear energy via deals that either revive mothballed plants, extend the life of existing ones through power-purchase agreements, or finance the development of SMRs — the latter of which haven’t been commercialized in the U.S. yet.
“As the U.S. faces rapid electricity demand growth, agreements like [Meta’s] demonstrate how private sector leadership can catalyze new energy solutions and reinforce grid reliability for all,” Ray Long, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy, said in a statement. “These projects will deliver firm, carbon-free electricity while speeding the deployment of advanced reactor technologies, supporting thousands of jobs in the U.S., and fortifying the grid.”
Meta didn’t disclose any financial details, but the combined investments appear to be its largest so far in the speed-to-power race with other hyperscalers. The company later this year plans to buy about 2.2 GW of energy and capacity from Vistra’s nuclear plants in Ohio, plus another 433 megawatts of incremental upgrades across two plants in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania over the next eight years.
The investments would add power to the grid that supports an AI “supercluster” Meta is building in New Albany, Ohio called Prometheus.
Ambitious SMR timelines
Meta’s deal with Oklo is also planned for Ohio, aimed at kickstarting a nuclear technology campus in the state. The companies said some reactors could come online as early as 2030, and eventually expand to 1.2 GW of power.
The hyperscaler’s deal with the Bill Gates-founded TerraPower hasn’t made a location for the projects public yet; said the agreement involves building up to eight of the company’s Natrium reactors paired with energy storage systems in the U.S. Two reactors could come online as soon as 2032. At full scale, the projects could have 2.6 GW of nuclear power and 1.2 GW of associated storage.
Those timelines are aggressive, perhaps implausibly so, given that neither company has secured construction permits for their advanced reactors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission yet. “We’re very eyes-wide-open that the schedule is challenging, but we think it’s important to be bold,” Urvi Parekh, director of global energy at Meta, told the Wall Street Journal.
That said, TerraPower cleared a milestone in December, when the NRC completed a final safety evaluation of its Natrium sodium-cooled reactor planned in Wyoming — moving it into a final phase of review at the commission, the company’s last major technical hurdle.
Oklo, meanwhile, plans to test its technology under a pilot program by the Department of Energy. The company broke ground in September 2025 on the site.
Meta’s competitors — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — have their own investments in the nuclear sector. Microsoft in 2024 inked a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, to the tune of $16 billion. Google and Amazon invested in SMR startups Kairos Power and X-energy, respectively. Google also partnered with NextEra Energy to try and reopen a decommissioned nuclear plant in Iowa.
Jeffries analysts said in a note to investors that Meta’s deal shows that hyperscalers prefer Gen IV reactors versus conventional ones, and are willing to pay. They added that the deals with Vistra and Oklo are a “welcome relief” for PJM, where investors are losing confidence in future data center deals.
Late last year, PJM’s independent market monitor filed an emergency complaint with federal energy regulators seeking to block the interconnection of new data center loads until there is enough guaranteed capacity to serve them. The filing blamed data centers for PJM’s recent price spikes.
