By Jennifer Hiller
Meta Platforms on Friday unveiled a series of agreements that would make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the U.S., where it needs city-size amounts of electricity for its artificial-intelligence data centers.
The Facebook parent said it would back new reactor projects with the developers TerraPower and Oklo and has struck a deal with the power producer Vistra to purchase and expand the generation output of three existing nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Financial details weren't disclosed, but the arrangements are among the most sweeping and ambitious so far between tech companies and nuclear-power providers. Vistra and Oklo shares both rose about 15% shortly after the stock market opened. TerraPower is privately held.
Meta aims to see the first new reactors delivered as early as 2030 and 2032, a speedy target even for more-conventional power projects. Its purchase of nuclear power from Vistra starts later this year and will keep power on the grid.
"We're very eyes-wide-open that the schedule is challenging, but we think it's important to be bold," Urvi Parekh, director of global energy at Meta, said in an interview.
Hitting those timelines for new reactors would require the companies to quickly select sites that would be acceptable to nuclear regulators, start working with utilities to secure grid connections, and get their manufacturing operations up and running, she said. But it would also mean they have a chance to meet the urgent demand for more electricity to fuel AI computing.
"If we allow ourselves to just focus on really far-out dates, we will push this technology out of being in consideration and being able to help the near-term crunch that we're all worrying about," Parekh said.
The AI boom has turbocharged demand projections for electricity, increased the demand for new natural-gas-fired power plants and led to long bottlenecks in connecting to the grid. It also has spurred the tech industry's fascination with nuclear power and created a "bring your own power" push for tech companies to build their own power generation.
Under its agreement with TerraPower, the reactor developer backed by Bill Gates, Meta would pay to help accelerate the development of two reactors that could generate up to 690 megawatts of capacity -- or enough to power a midsize city -- by 2032. Another six units could follow by 2035, Meta said.
A big question for reactor developers has been when solid commercial orders will materialize.
"We're getting paid to start a project, which is really different," said Chris Levesque, chief executive officer of TerraPower. "This is an order for real work to begin a megaproject."
With Oklo, the Meta funding would help kick-start the development of a nuclear campus in Ohio. Oklo said Meta's prepayments for power would be used to secure nuclear fuel and advance the first phase of the project, which could eventually grow to about 1,200 megawatts of capacity, about what a large reactor generates.
Jacob DeWitte, Oklo's co-founder and CEO, called the deal "a major step in moving advanced nuclear forward."
Oklo plans to develop the project on 206 acres in Pike County, Ohio. The company went public in 2024 when it merged with a special-purpose acquisition company headed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Vistra, for its part, said it would start planning for federal license extensions at the Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio and the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania. A 20-year agreement with Meta includes 2,176 megawatts of operating capacity from the reactors in Ohio and an additional 433 megawatts of generation-output increases, known as uprates, across all three locations.
The outlook for the nuclear sector has improved dramatically of late -- all three plants had been expected to close just a few years ago. But even with today's rising power prices and more federal support for nuclear power, Vistra Chief Executive Jim Burke said the extensions and uprates wouldn't be possible without Meta's financial support.
Last year, Meta agreed to buy the power generation of a nuclear plant in Illinois for 20 years under a deal with Constellation Energy. The power company said it would help cover the costs of re-licensing, upgrades and maintenance.
The agreement with Vistra is similar. Under what is known as a power-purchase agreement, Meta would buy the nuclear-power generation, but electricity from all of the reactors involved would continue to flow to the grid.
Other tech-nuclear deals include Amazon.com's investment in the reactor developer X-energy, Microsoft's 20-year power-purchase agreement with Constellation to spur the restart of the former Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, and a Google- NextEra Energy partnership to reopen a nuclear reactor in Iowa.
Write to Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2026 09:57 ET (14:57 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
