Will Wade | Bloomberg | Tuesday, August 18, 2026 | 02:00 PM UTC
TerraPower LLC, the only company building a utility-scale nuclear power plant in the US, expects to announce its next project this year — one intended for a data center.
That would put the Bill Gates-backed company on track to break ground on its second project in 2027, Chief Executive Officer Chris Levesque said in a Tuesday interview. He declined to identify the customer.
Data center deals are a new focus for TerraPower, which was initially founded with the goal of feeding electricity to utilities. The emergence of power-hungry artificial intelligence applications, as well as industrial users such as semiconductor plants that are now considering on-site generation, opens a new customer base for companies developing small reactors.
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor design has 345 megawatts of capacity, far smaller than conventional nuclear plants that typically have about 1 gigawatt of capacity. The company announced last week a series of deals with South Korean companies to support the deployment of the technology, including Hyundai Engineering & Construction, which agreed to build as many as eight of them.
