“AI data centers are short on power” has been the running story for two years, but most of the discussion stops at “build more plants.” A TechCrunch report published August 19, 2026 points at a different idea from TerraPower, the company Bill Gates founded: the secret weapon of its Natrium reactor is not generation itself but heat storage — a nuclear plant that follows the data center’s load curve, rather than demanding the load follow the plant. The question is no longer whether nuclear belongs in the AI power mix, but whether nuclear can work at the pace data centers run on.
The Power Problem With Data Centers
Nuclear’s strength is steady output; its weakness is exactly that steadiness. Conventional reactors ramp at roughly 5 percent of rated output per minute, and new small modular reactors only about 10 percent. AI training and inference loads, meanwhile, can swing hard in short windows, with large gaps between peak and trough. On the other side of the ledger, US nuclear plants run at a capacity factor of about 92.5 percent — the equipment is cheapest when it runs flat out all year. A power source that cannot turn easily, paired with a customer whose load curve is violent, frustrates both sides.
The contradiction has sharpened in 2026: new data center campuses routinely need hundreds of megawatts of dedicated power, grid interconnection queues stretch for years, and gas turbines, while fast to deploy, come with fuel costs and emissions that are hard to plan around. Nuclear is back on the table — on the condition that someone finds a way to make it dispatchable.
Molten Salt Heat Storage: Run Flat Out, Follow the Load
Natrium is a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled reactor, and the key design choice is this: the reactor always runs at full power. When grid demand is low, the surplus heat is not wasted — it is stashed in a large vat of molten salt. When demand spikes, that stored heat converts into extra steam and drives the turbines harder. TechCrunch also ran a correction worth noting: the heat storage medium is molten salt, not the liquid sodium used for cooling. The effect is that one plant plays both roles at once — a baseload generator and a dispatchable resource in the same facility.
The trade-off is real: heat storage adds capital cost, and how long the plant can boost output depends on how much salt it installs. But compared with the alternatives utilities usually reach for — gas peakers that sit idle most of the year, or batteries sized for hours rather than evenings of extra steam — a reactor that was going to run at full power anyway is a different economic animal.
After Wyoming: A Data Center Project in 2027
The first Natrium plant is already under construction in Wyoming. According to the report, a data center project is expected to break ground in 2027 and would draw on TerraPower’s second plant. Bloomberg has reported that the company plans to announce its first data center project this year. The customer has not been named, but the direction is not hard to guess: in January, TerraPower announced that Meta agreed to buy eight Natrium plants. For the company, designing the second plant for a single customer from day one removes the build-first, find-a-buyer-later risk. For data center operators, tying the plant and the campus to one timeline turns “when do we get power” from a place in a queue into a contract clause.
What It Means for the Compute Build-Out
Nuclear has the highest capital expenditure of any generation technology, and its economics depend on running expensive equipment around the clock and amortizing fixed costs over as many megawatt-hours as possible. Load-following closes the missing gap on that road: sell more power at peak, bank heat off-peak, keep the plant’s revenue engine at full tilt, and hand the data center controllable low-carbon electricity. Molten salt storage is not a new invention — concentrating solar plants have used it for years — but inside a nuclear plant the cost logic works even better, because the reactor was going to run at full power anyway; storage just turns surplus heat into sellable flexibility. Two signals are worth watching: who the first data center customer turns out to be when the announcement lands this year, and whether competing reactor designs start shipping heat storage as standard equipment rather than an option. For cloud providers and data center developers scrambling for power across the country, the signal is clear — when picking a power source, “can it follow my load” is becoming as important as price.
Sources
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.