Alphabet’s Google said on Monday it had signed the first business deal to buy power from multiple small reactors as the tech company looks to meet electricity demand from artificial intelligence.
The agreement with Kairos Power aims to bring the first small Kairos reactor online in 2030, followed by additional deployments in 2035.
The companies did not disclose financial details of the deal or where in the US the plants would be built. Google said it has agreed to buy 500 megawatts of power from six to seven reactors, smaller than the output of today’s nuclear reactors.
“We feel that nuclear weapons can play an important role in helping to fulfill our needs. . . cleanly in a way that lasts around the clock,” Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google, told reporters on the phone.
Tech firms have signed several recent deals with nuclear power companies this year as artificial intelligence boosts energy demand for the first time in decades.
In March, Amazon.com bought a nuclear-powered data center from Talen Energy. Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed an energy deal to help revive the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the worst US nuclear accident in 1979.
US data center energy consumption is expected to nearly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, with natural gas, wind and solar power expected to fill the gap.
The Google deal will depend on Kairos getting full approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local agencies.
Kairos late last year received a construction permit from the NRC to build a demonstration reactor in Tennessee. But Kairos needs design and construction permits from the NRC for the reactors in the deal announced Monday.
Small modular reactors are intended to be smaller than today’s reactors with components built in a factory, instead of onsite, to help reduce construction costs.
Critics say SMRs will be expensive because they may not be able to achieve economies of scale for large plants. In addition, they will likely produce long-lived nuclear waste that the country does not yet have a repository for.
Google said that by committing to the so-called order book framework with Kairos, instead of buying one reactor at a time, it sends a demand signal to the market and makes long-term investments to accelerate the development of SMRs.
“We hope this new approach will improve the chances of our projects being delivered on cost and on time,” said Mike Laufer, founder and CEO of Kairos.
—Timothy Gardner, Reuters
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