Meta says it signed agreements with TerraPower, Oklo and Vistra for nuclear power to support its Prometheus artificial intelligence data center project in New Albany, Ohio.
The parent company of Facebook said the deals were announced Friday and will help supply Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt AI cluster planned across multiple data center buildings. Meta said it expects Prometheus to come online this year, after announcing the project in July.
Meta said the three agreements will support up to 6.6 gigawatts of new and existing clean energy by 2035. The company also referenced a general utilities industry standard that says one gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes.
Financial terms of the agreements with TerraPower, Oklo and Vistra were not disclosed. In a statement announcing the deals, Meta said, “These projects add reliable and firm power to the grid, reinforce America’s nuclear supply chain, and support new and existing jobs to build and operate American power plants,”.
The company said its agreement with TerraPower will provide funding for two new Natrium units capable of generating up to 690 megawatts of firm power, with delivery as early as 2032. Meta said the deal also gives it rights for energy from up to six other Natrium units capable of producing 2.1 gigawatts, targeted for delivery by 2035.
Meta said it will buy more than 2.1 gigawatts of energy from two operating Vistra nuclear power plants in Ohio, in addition to energy from expansions at those plants and a third Vistra plant in Pennsylvania. It said those projects connect to the grid for customers in the mid-Atlantic region that includes Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Vistra said electricity from the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania, and the Davis-Besse and Perry plants in Ohio, will run through the mid-Atlantic grid for all electricity customers. The company also said the agreements with Meta “provide certainty” for it to ask federal regulators for 20-year license renewals for the reactors.
The AP reported that tech companies have faced pressure in the stressed mid-Atlantic grid to build new power sources to supply their data centers. Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University who specializes in energy systems, said bringing Prometheus online without a new power source would increase electricity rates across the mid-Atlantic grid, according to the report.
Jenkins’ comments reflected concerns that ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic are already paying higher electricity bills to support new and proposed data centers, the AP said. Meta’s nuclear deals come as part of that broader push for additional capacity.
The company said the Oklo agreement will help develop a 1.2-gigawatt power campus in Pike County, Ohio, to support its data centers in the region. The AP noted that Oklo counts OpenAI’s Sam Altman as one of its largest investors.
Meta’s nuclear power agreements also follow an earlier announcement in June that it reached a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy, according to the AP report.