One of the largest concerns with creating functional AI is powering the data centres. Meta and others are looking to nuclear energy to realise their ambitions, with the social media giant announcing new partnerships that will see the companies creating up to 6.6GW of power from various nuclear projects over the next ten years.
According to the company, its new partnerships will “extend and expand the operation of three nuclear power plants, boost the development of new advanced nuclear technology, and foster job growth” in the US. The upshot is that its AI will have enough power to get around and do… stuff. Useful stuff? Hopefully.
Meta goes nuclear (again)
The new partnership between Meta and entities Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo will add around 10% of South Africa’s generation capability to America’s power infrastructure. Not all of that will go to surrounding homes and workplaces, of course.
Meta will, according to its new agreements, hoover up much of that new electricity. At least a third of it, 2.1GW, will head in Mark Zuckerberg’s direction courtesy of Vistra, which operates existing nuclear power plants. The internet giant also has options on energy from TerraPower. That company is building new Natrium sodium-cooled reactors to provide that power, but it’s not clear how much will be dedicated to AI.
Planned onboarding of new nuclear capability is set for 2030, 2032, and 2035, making these long-term projects for all concerned. Meta also has a pre-existing partnership with a company called Constellation Energy for nuclear resources that it finalised midway through 2025.
So far, the company says, it has added 28GW of energy to America’s grid, a project that has run for more than ten years. That’s a little under half of Eskom’s total generation capacity. Perhaps we should petition for a few nuclear-powered Facebook/Instagram/Llama servers here in South Africa.
