The idea that nuclear energy is well placed to support rising electricity demand from the growth of AI data centres is not new. There is now a growing and accepted consensus that nuclear power, particularly the Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), are uniquely positioned to meet the baseload power requirements of AI data centres.

In the US, tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have signed contracts with nuclear power reactor developers/utilities such as TerraPower-Oklo, Constellation Energy, Kairos Power, Energy Northwest and Dominion Energy[2] to support data centre operations by a certain timeframe. In June 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a contract with Talen Energy (TLN.O), lasting until 2042, to supply up to 1,920 megawatts of electricity from its Susquehanna plant in Pennsylvania to AWS data centres.[3]

More recently (July 2026), the US government entered into negotiations with Amentum to develop an AI data centre with a dedicated on-site energy generation source at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This is in line with President Trump’s Executive Order on ‘Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure (2025)’.[4]

Indeed, nuclear power, being a low-carbon electricity source, is increasingly being viewed as a part of the sustainable solution to meet the rising demand of data centres, particularly through the on-site deployment of reactors. On the other hand, AI is also being viewed as positively contributing to nuclear energy expansion through its tools for optimising reactor performance, etc. The International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests that electricity consumption from data centres was “estimated to amount to around 415 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption in 2024…”.[5] It is forecast to........

© IDSA