Nuclear-Powered Data Centers Coming to Ohio, Pennsylvania

Standard Power, a data center operator that provides colocation for AI training and blockchain mining, is planning to deploy up to two dozen small modular reactors (SMR) to power data center campuses in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the company has announced.

The two data campuses will use reactors built by ENTRA1, an energy development and production company, which will use SMR technology from NuScale Power Corp., which this year became the first company to have an SMR design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Up to 24 modular reactors will be deployed at the two data center hubs, capable of generating nearly 2 gigawatts of power. Similar in scale to the nuclear reactors that are used by the US Navy to power subs and aircraft carriers, each of the pressurized water SMR units can generate 77 megawatts of electricity.

Portland, OR-based NuScale is marketing the small reactors to supply nuclear energy for electrical generation, district heating, desalination, commercial-scale hydrogen production and other process heat applications.

In 2022, NuScale formed an exclusive global partnership with ENTRA1 Energy to commercialize the SMR technology, granting ENTA1 the rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by the small reactors.

Standard Power provides Infrastructure as a Service to advanced data processing operations. Maxim Serezhin, Standard Power’s CEO, said the modular reactors are poised to address a “large gap” in power generation as demand grows for power-hungry data centers to support the needs of AI companies training bots.

“We see a lot of legacy baseload grid capacity going offline with a lack of new sustainable baseload generation options on the market especially as power demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-computing and data centers is growing,” Serezhin said, in a statement.

While the campuses under development in Ohio and Pennsylvania will be the first data center facilities to deploy SMR units, they won’t be the first data centers that plan to use nuclear power.

In February, Richmond, VA-based Dominion Energy-the primary supplier of electricity for the largest North American data center hub in Northern Virginia-and NE Edge announced plans to build a 1.5M SF data center campus adjacent to Dominion’s nuclear power plant in Waterford, Connecticut.

The companies filed plans in Waterford to build the campus, consisting of two hyperscale data centers, next to the Millstone Nuclear Power Station, a 57-year-old facility owned by Dominion, according to a report in the Connecticut Examiner.

Millstone is Connecticut’s only nuclear power plant-and the only nuke facility in New England with more than one operating reactor. At full power, the Waterford complex can generate more than 2 gigawatts of electricity.

Under an incentive enacted in Connecticut in 2021 to spur data center development, data centers are exempted from local property taxes if they negotiate a fee with the municipality where the facility will be located. NE Edge has offered $231M to Waterford over 30 years in lieu of the property tax, according to the newspaper report.

The partners are planning two, two-story data centers on a 25-acre site adjacent to the power plant, the first encompassing 1.14M SF and the second totaling 428K SF, with delivery expected by mid-2025.

The data center campus will draw power directly from the Millstone plant in what is known as a “behind the meter” agreement with Dominion. Behind the meter arrangements generally have lower rates because no transmission is involved in servicing the facility.