Meta announced three new deals with nuclear power companies last week, claiming they add up to a massive amount of “clean” energy to power its AI data centers: 6,600 megawatts (MW), equal to six of the new reactors that recently came online in Georgia. Meta claims it will be receiving all of that power from a combination of existing and new nuclear power plants by 2035. In conjunction with another deal Meta announced with Constellation Energy a few months ago, Meta now has agreements with nuclear companies totaling nearly 7,800 MW, of which nearly half 3,300 MW could be under contract by mid 2027.
That sounds like a lot, but scratch the surface and there’s not much there. Take, for instance, the Constellation deal. The 1,140 MW Clinton Nuclear Power Plant goes into effect in June 2027. Why June 2027? Because a 10-year Illinois state subsidy program expires in May 2027, under which Clinton has been receiving over $90 million per year from electricity customers, in the form of zero-emissions credits (ZECs) the state’s two largest utilities are required to purchase from Constellation. These state-regulated, non-tradeable instruments are going away in May. Meta’s contract with Constellation is not to buy the electricity from Clinton, which Constellation sells on the wholesale market. Rather, it is to pay Constellation for “ZECs” after the state-regulated program expires.
That is to say, Meta’s deal with Constellation is not to provide power to Meta’s data centers. Meta will still be buying power off the grid for its AI data centers in addition to Constellation’s ZECs. It is only buying certificates from Constellation in order to claim Meta is buying the “greenness” of the electricity Clinton generates through a private, unregulated transaction. But the electricity Meta will be using is, in reality, no greener than the rest of the electricity on the grid. In fact, the large increases in demand that Meta’s AI data centers are contributing to is largely being provided by fossil fuel power plants, increasing emissions and making the grid dirtier.
That brings us to Meta’s announcements of three new deals with nuclear power corporations on January 9:
- A 20-year contract with Vistra to buy up to 2,600 MW from four reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania;
- Up to 1,200 GW from the nuclear startup company Oklo; and
- Up to 2,760 MW of nuclear capacity and 1,200 MW of storage capacity from another nuclear startup company, Terrapower.
For further background:
Meta inks trio of nuclear deals to support AI ambitions
The Oklo agreement is the smallest of the three, though the only one that has immediate impact is with Vistra, to buy power from Davis-Besse and Perry (2,176 MW), as well as power from 433 MW of planned power uprates at D-B, Perry, and Beaver Valley:
Meta and Vistra’s deal is a 20-year power purchase agreement that will provide Meta with over 2,600 megawatts of nuclear energy from three of Vistra’s nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The deal includes agreements for 2,176 MW of operational generation, along with 433 MW of power output increases.
As detailed in Vistra’s press release, though, it appears this is more like the deal between Constellation and Meta involving the Clinton reactor. That is really a subsidized greenwashing deal, under which Meta is buying “ZECs” from Clinton (i.e., not the actual power) after the Illinois ZEC program expires in May 2027.
From Vistra’s release:
- Meta is purchasing 2,176 MW of nuclear energy and capacity from the operating Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio;
- Meta is also purchasing 433 MW of incremental nuclear energy and capacity from equipment upgrades to increase generation output (called uprates) at the Perry (Ohio), Davis-Besse (Ohio), and Beaver Valley (Pennsylvania) plants … ;
- the electricity generated at the plants will continue to go to the grid for all electricity users.
… Meta’s purchases under the agreements will begin in late 2026, with additional capacity added to the grid through 2034, when the full 2,609 MW of power will be online.
It’s not at all clear what Vistra means by “purchasing … capacity” since Vistra sells capacity from its power plants in the PJM capacity market auction, which has been extraordinarily lucrative in recent years because of the AI data center expansion. But putting “nuclear energy and capacity” together with the third bullet that says all of the electricity will go on the grid, that suggests Meta is basically buying the equivalent of the fake ZECs it plans to buy from Clinton, as a greenwashing instrument. That means, Meta is really just buying power off the grid and getting Vistra’s and Constellation’s permission to claim it is all “clean” electricity by paying them a subsidy on the side.
In order for this scheme to have any credibility under the Clinton deal, Constellation and Meta have to wait until June 2027, after the official, Illinois-regulated ZEC program expires. However, the deal with Vistra is under no such constraint. The creation of a ZEC-like program was the major feature of a law enacted in Ohio in 2019 (HB 6) through a $60 million corruption scheme, but it never went into effect. After federal prosecutors indicted legislators and lobbyists in 2020 and exposed the corruption involved in enacting HB 6, the legislature repealed the nuclear subsidy provisions. Vistra and Meta are free to initiate their greenwashing contract right away. And since there are no actual emissions standards in Ohio that Meta has to comply with, they are free to engage in fake schemes like this to put a green label on their data centers without any laws being broken scheme like this to put a green label on their data centers without any laws being broken.
Breaking: “Oklo, Meta Announce Agreement in Support of 1.2 GW Nuclear Energy Development in Southern Ohio
Meta’s agreement with Oklo highlights growing market demand for advanced nuclear energy and commitment to clean power”
(Read the full announcement here)
The deals with the startup companies Terrapower and Oklo are both for future deployments of two-dozen reactors using designs that have never been built before. The Terrapower deal is apparently for eight 345-MW Natrium reactors, but initially only two. Each Natrium reactor is also to include 150 MW of storage. Neither of these first two reactors is the one Terrapower is planning to build in Wyoming, for which it is seeking a construction permit.
In total, the deal would amount to 4,000 MW of capacity: 2,760 MW of nuclear capacity and 1,200 MW of storage–but only one-fourth of all that to start with. It appears Terrapower envisions siting its reactors in pairs, along with the molten salt thermal storage “peaker” units that it plans for its Wyoming project. The Terrapower release says this:
This agreement supports the early development activities for two new Natrium units with rights for energy provided to Meta for up to six additional Natrium units. Each Natrium reactor provides 345 MW of baseload power, with built-in energy storage that can ramp up to 500 MW for over five hours. A dual Natrium unit can provide 690 MW of firm power, and up to 1 GW of dispatchable electricity. The companies will target identification of a specific site for the initial dual reactor unit in the coming months.
It is not clear how Terrapower would get the first reactors online in 2032 as projected, since the Wyoming project isn’t supposed to come online until at least 2031, and it has already been planned for at least six years. Shortening the time to deploy Natrium reactors from at least 11 years to only six when the first one has not even begun construction yet and the subsequent ones do not even have a location identified makes the announced schedule appear unrealistic.
The Oklo deal is even less likely to result in nuclear power generation for Meta’s data centers. Aside from naming a location, the Oklo-Meta announcement is incredibly vague. For scale, 1.2 GW would require sixteen of Oklo’s 75 MW used-to-be-microreactors-but-are-now-SMRs on a 206-acre lot in Ohio. Building that many reactors on just 206 acres of land may not be logistically feasible, considering all of the infrastructure and auxiliary facilities necessary for such a large number of reactors. Meta acquired the proposed site from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), but apparently does not have an immediate use for it, so transferring the site to Oklo could curry favor with DOE Secretary Chris Wright, who has a well-known relationship to Oklo. In fact, Oklo is now in business with Secretary Wright’s former employer, the fracked gas company Liberty Energy, to provide gas-generated power to Oklo’s data center customers until a future date when Oklo builds reactors, in an arrangement similar to Oklo’s agreements with another gas generator company, Rpower, to provide electricity to Oklo customers.
The fact that there is no amount of investment from Meta mentioned in Oklo’s press release is typical of Oklo’s other “master power agreements” but the announcement is includes a very ambiguous statement on the matter:
The agreement provides a mechanism for Meta to prepay for power and provide funding to advance project certainty for Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse deployment. …
Oklo will use the funds to secure nuclear fuel and advance Phase 1 of the project—supporting the development of clean, reliable power in Pike County that can scale up to 1.2 GW
It is hard to understand what that truly means. “Pre-paying for power” is not a typical business model in the electricity sector. It implies that Meta is paying Oklo now for electricity that will be generated at a later date, but that means Oklo would be accepting funds from Meta “to secure nuclear fuel and advance Phase 1 of the project.” The other part–“to secure nuclear fuel”–could mean various things, including funding for Oklo’s proposed $1.7 billion reprocessing plant in Tennessee, which it plans to use for its reactors’ fuel supply. That project is also years away from being constructed.
Pointedly, though, it does not say Phase 1 of the project is building reactors. The “development of clean, reliable power” is just as often a euphemism for gas generation. In disclosures to its shareholders, Oklo has stated that its other deals with data center companies anticipate delivering them electricity from gas power plants (provided by Rpower) in the near term and for the foreseeable future, with a vague plan to “transition” to power from Oklo’s reactors when it someday, maybe builds them. It would be safe to assume the same is true of the Meta deal. But if so, how will Oklo pay for the construction and operation of 1.2 GW of reactors if Meta’s “prepayment” revenues are used for gas generation and construction of a reprocessing plant?
Meta’s nuclear deals of January 9 add up to, at most, a proposal to build two Terrapower reactors in the 2030s, totalling 690 MW of nuclear power and 300 MW of storage. That is likely contingent on the success (and the cost) of Terrapower’s first Natrium reactor project, which has yet to begin construction. The other 6 GW of claimed nuclear capacity is a combination of vaporware (2.6 GW of ZECs from Vistra) and speculative plans for new reactors.