Meta on Friday revealed it has struck deals with three nuclear energy companies to power its data centers, as the social media giant advances its ambitions in AI, including the pursuit of superintelligence.
The agreements with nuclear energy 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 up to 6.6 gigawatts of electricity by 2035 to power its data centers.
The deals position Meta as a significant buyer of nuclear power, surpassing Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and adding another element to the AI race.
Data centers have become increasingly important in recent years, particularly as generative and agentic AI models require massive amounts of energy for training and inference. The new deals could bring Meta closer to its goal of building superintelligence, systems that surpass human performance in most cognitive tasks.
With Vistra, Meta signed a 20-year power purchase agreement to buy more than 2,600 megawatts from nuclear stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio run by Vistra and TerraPower. Meanwhile, Meta will help support Oklo’s development of 1.2 gigawatts of nuclear energy from Oklo’s campus in Pike County, Ohio. Meta will also fund the development of two of TerraPower’s Natrium advanced reactor units by 2032, with rights to more energy from six future units.
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A Lack of Resources
The deals follow Meta’s agreement with Constellation Energy last year to purchase 1,100 megawatts from the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois starting next year. The deals will also help power projects such as Meta’s Prometheus supercluster, a 1-gigawatt AI data center being built in New Albany, Ohio.
The need to acquire ever-increasing amounts of power has become a top priority for AI hyperscalers, including Meta, according to Chirag Shah, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Generative and agentic AI-driven systems require continuously more resources such as AI chips, data centers, power, coolant and networking infrastructure.
“Our consumption is going up, and all these chips and data centers are just coming out left and right,” Shah said. “All these chips that we are running … they consume a ton of power, and we are running out of normal means to get that power from the usual grid.”
Because they can’t acquire enough electricity from existing power grids, Meta and other AI vendors, such as Google and Microsoft, are partnering with nuclear companies as an alternative source of energy. Google has struck nuclear deals with nuclear energy firms Kairos Power and NextEra Energy. Microsoft has an agreement with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, which partially melted down in 1979.
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Energy and power are not the only limited resources in the AI market.
Many are also concerned about depleting water sources to cool the data centers.
“All of these things are costing planet Earth a lot, but right now, nothing is preventing them from making these deals and securing things, prioritizing things for running their data centers,” Shah said.
These deals allow Meta to demonstrate its progress toward a cleaner form of energy, Shah added. While nuclear power has stalled for decades, it has been slowly making a comeback, partly because many consider it cleaner than coal, oil, and natural gas plants. Even so, many observers still consider nuclear power to be potentially dangerous because of the problem of storing and disposing of radioactive materials.
Public Opinion and Consequences
However, Meta’s nuclear power initiatives demonstrate the scope of its influence, ambition, and ability to drive the development of advanced AI technology and shape public opinion about the social media giant, said David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group.
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“They’re signaling to the equity markets that they are in a position of strength here,” Nicholson said. Meta’s aggressiveness on the power front could also trigger other hyperscalers, such as Google or Microsoft, to make more power 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 yet to be actualized, Nicholson said.
For example, some of the projects mentioned have yet to be built, and the timetable appears to be so long — with a completion date of around 2035 for all the Natrium units — that it suggests that Meta could be overextending itself.
Nicholson said consumers will have to monitor whether these large-scale deals affect their energy bills.
“If you can lock up an agreement with somebody like Meta at a certain price, everybody else is going to have to pay more,” he said. “We’re going to have to closely follow that because there are huge incentives for big industrial players to behave very badly.”
For enterprises paying attention to the AI market, it might be best to take a cautious approach, Nicholson continued.
“The people who are making the huge bets, and that is the Open AIs, the Nvidias, the hyperscale cloud providers — some of those bets are going to pay off like never before, and others are going to fail spectacularly,” he said.
