The US government agreed a $80 billion deal with Westinghouse Electric Co. to build large-scale nuclear reactors, the latest push to meet rising demand for electricity from artificial intelligence.
The strategic partnership — which also involves Brookfield Asset Management and Canadian uranium producer Cameco Corp. — aims to deliver on President Donald Trump’s AI ambitions and scale up an industry he sees as vital to competing with China. The companies said Tuesday the initiative will create tens of thousands of jobs across the country.
Cameco shares rose as much as 17% in pre-market trading in New York.
Power consumption from US data centers is expected to double by 2035, reaching almost 9% of total demand, according to BloombergNEF. The surge has triggered a rush to build new power stations and secure grid connections. Yet nuclear projects take years to complete, prompting some companies, like Google, to seek power from reopened reactors to meet near-term needs.
Many hopes for a nuclear renaissance in the US are focused on developing small modular reactors, but the Westinghouse pact is for large scale reactors and chimes with an announcement by power developer Fermi Inc. to begin production of four big reactors that would be used for a private data center grid campus in the Texas Panhandle.
The agreement comes against the backdrop of a sluggish US nuclear buildout: only three reactors have been completed this century.
Each two-unit Westinghouse AP1000 site creates or sustains 45,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in 43 states, and a national deployment will create more than 100,000 construction jobs, the companies said. There are six AP1000 reactors in operation and the technology has been selected for programs in Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria.
“The program will cement the United States as one of the world’s nuclear energy powerhouses and increase exports of Westinghouse’s nuclear power generation technology globally,” according to the statement.
Plants that could be reopened include:
- NextEra Energy Inc. plans to restart a nuclear power plant in Iowa, primarily to supply Google data centers.
- Constellation Energy Corp. is working to bring one of the reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania back into service by 2027.
- Holtec International plans to restart the Palisades plant in Michigan by early next year.
- South Carolina utility Santee Cooper said last week it’s talking to Brookfield Asset Management about finishing the partially built VC Summer project that was abandoned in 2017 as costs spiraled.
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