Bill Gates’ nuclear startup is moving into the AI power race. TerraPower expects to announce its first data center customer this year, Bloomberg reported, with construction targeted for 2027 at what would be the company’s second plant. Its first reactor is rising in Wyoming.
The pitch rests on a design feature rivals lack: built-in energy storage. The 345-megawatt Natrium reactor runs on molten salt and dumps surplus heat into a reservoir of molten sodium. Demand spikes at a connected data center simply tap that stored heat to spin more steam, so the reactor never has to throttle down.
That matters because AI workloads strain conventional plants. Most reactors adjust output by about 5 percent of rated capacity per minute, and even small modular designs manage only around 10 percent, while gas turbines have failed under the stress of GPU-driven swings. TerraPower keeps its costliest hardware humming at high utilization, smoothing demand from renewables or compute clusters alike.
Meta already agreed in January to buy eight Natrium plants. Nuclear’s 92.5 percent capacity factor leads all generating technologies, but its capital costs are the highest too, which is why steady, full-tilt operation is central to the economics.
