TerraPower, the nuclear startup founded by Bill Gates, plans to announce its first data center project this year, according to Bloomberg. The facility would break ground in 2027 and become the company’s second power plant, joining one already under construction in Wyoming. The customer hasn’t been named, though Meta agreed in January to buy eight of TerraPower’s Natrium reactors.
What makes TerraPower’s pitch different comes down to a giant vat of molten sodium. Most nuclear reactors struggle to ramp up and down quickly—existing U.S. plants can adjust output by only about 5% of rated capacity per minute, and even new small modular reactors manage just 10%. Data centers, especially those training AI models, have power demands that spike and crash as GPUs spin up and idle. Natural gas turbines have literally broken under the strain. Batteries help smooth the curve but add cost.
TerraPower sidesteps the ramping problem entirely. The reactor keeps splitting atoms at full tilt regardless of demand, and surplus heat gets dumped into molten sodium storage. When a data center suddenly needs more juice, that stored heat generates additional steam to spin turbines. The expensive reactor never throttles down, so the company amortizes its capital costs over more operational hours—a big deal for nuclear, which carries the highest upfront costs of any generating technology.
This design originally targeted renewable-heavy grids, where wind and solar create their own intermittency headaches. Data centers turned out to be the same problem wearing different clothes. Whether TerraPower can actually deliver remains unproven—every nuclear startup admits its first plants will be expensive, and mass manufacturing savings are still theoretical. But if the sodium storage works as advertised, TerraPower would occupy a genuinely unique position: base-load nuclear that behaves like a peaker plant.
