To power its artificial intelligence data centers, Meta has signed three agreements, obtaining enough energy to light up around five million homes.
Facebook’s parent company revealed on Friday that it has reached nuclear power agreements with TerraPower, Oklo, and Vistra for its Prometheus AI data center, which is being constructed in New Albany, Ohio.
Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt cluster spread over several data center buildings, was announced by Meta in July. It is expected to launch this year.
The agreements with TerraPower, Oklo, and Vistra did not provide their financial details.
The three agreements will support up to 6.6 gigawatts of new and existing sustainable energy by 2035, according to a statement released on Friday by the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta.
A basic industry norm for utilities states that roughly 750,000 houses can be powered by a single gigawatt.
The corporation stated, “These projects support new and existing jobs to build and operate American power plants, reinforce America’s nuclear supply chain, and add reliable and firm power to the grid.”
According to Meta, funding for the construction of two new Natrium units that can produce up to 690 megawatts of firm electricity with delivery as early as 2032 will be provided under its deal with TerraPower.
Additionally, the agreement gives Meta the right to purchase energy from up to six additional Natrium facilities that may generate 2.1 gigawatts and are scheduled to be delivered by 2035.
Along with the energy from expansions at the two Ohio plants and a third Vistra nuclear power facility in Pennsylvania, Meta will also purchase more than 2.1 gigawatts of energy from two Vistra nuclear power reactors that are currently in operation.
According to Vistra, all electrical consumers will continue to receive power from the three power plants—Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania and Davis-Besse and Perry in Ohio—through the mid-Atlantic grid.
Additionally, it stated that the agreements with Meta “provide certainty” for it to request 20-year license renewals for the reactors from federal regulators.
In the strained mid-Atlantic grid, which includes Ohio and Pennsylvania, IT corporations have faced pressure to develop new power sources to meet the full electricity requirements of their new data centers.
Bringing Prometheus online without a new power source will merely raise electricity bills throughout the mid-Atlantic grid, according to Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University with expertise in energy systems.
To sustain new and planned data centers, ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic already pay higher electricity prices.
To support Meta’s data centers in the area, the agreement with Oklo, which has Sam Altman of OpenAI as one of its biggest investors, would aid in the development of a 1.2-gigawatt power campus in Pike County, Ohio.
The nuclear power deals follow Meta’s June announcement that it had secured a 20-year arrangement with Constellation Energy.
