Summary: For two years the industry has repeated that AI data centers lack power, yet the talk rarely gets past “build more plants.” A TechCrunch report dated August 19, 2026 describes a different route from TerraPower, the company Bill Gates founded: the true secret weapon of its Natrium reactor is not the generating side but heat storage — a nuclear plant that tracks the data center’s load curve instead of demanding the load track the plant. To the cloud providers and data center developers hunting for power nationwide, the signal is plain — a power source that can follow their load now counts nearly as much as its price.
For two years the industry has repeated that AI data centers lack power, yet the talk rarely gets past “build more plants.” A TechCrunch report dated August 19, 2026 describes a different route from TerraPower, the company Bill Gates founded: the true secret weapon of its Natrium reactor is not the generating side but heat storage — a nuclear plant that tracks the data center’s load curve instead of demanding the load track the plant. The question has shifted: no longer whether nuclear belongs in the AI power mix, but whether nuclear can work at the pace data centers run on.
Why Steady Supply Meets Unsteady Demand
Nuclear’s strength is steady output, and that same steadiness is its weakness. A conventional reactor ramps at roughly 5 percent of rated output per minute, while new small modular reactors (SMRs) manage only about 10 percent. AI training and inference loads can swing hard within short windows, leaving wide gaps between peak and trough. US nuclear plants, for their part, run at a capacity factor around 92.5 percent — the equipment pays off best when pushed flat out all year. A source that cannot turn, serving a customer with a violent load curve, leaves both sides frustrated.
By 2026 the tension has sharpened: new data center campuses routinely call for hundreds of megawatts of dedicated power, interconnection queues stretch for years, and gas turbines, quick to deploy, come with fuel costs and emissions that resist planning. So nuclear is back on the table — conditional on someone making it dispatchable.
Bank the Surplus Heat, Let Output Chase Demand
Natrium is a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled reactor, and the choice at the heart of its design is that the reactor runs at full power the whole time. When grid demand is low, surplus heat is not thrown away but banked in a large vat of molten salt; when demand spikes, that heat comes back as extra steam and drives the turbines harder. TechCrunch also carried a correction worth noting: the storage medium is molten salt, not the liquid sodium used for cooling. One reactor thus fills two roles at once — baseload generator and dispatchable resource.
The trade-off is real: storage equipment adds capital cost, and how long output can be boosted depends on how much salt the plant installs. Set against what utilities usually reach for, though — gas peakers idle most of the year, or batteries holding a few hours rather than evenings of extra steam — a reactor that was going to run flat out regardless is a different kind of asset.
From Wyoming: A 2027 Data Center Project Breaks Ground
The first Natrium plant is already under construction in Wyoming. The report says a data center project is expected to break ground in 2027 and would draw on TerraPower’s second plant, while Bloomberg reported that the company intends to announce its first data center project within the year. No customer has been named yet, though the direction takes little guessing: in January, TerraPower announced that Meta had agreed to buy eight Natrium plants. Building the second plant around a single buyer from the outset spares the company the risk of finishing a reactor before finding someone to buy its output; for operators, lashing plant and campus to one schedule converts “when do we get power” from a place in a queue into a clause in a contract.
What This Means for the Compute Build-Out
Of every way to generate electricity, nuclear demands the most capital up front, which is why its arithmetic rests on keeping costly equipment working the entire time and loading fixed costs onto as many megawatt-hours as the plant can produce. The ability to follow load supplies the missing piece: more sales at peak, stored heat off-peak, the revenue engine still at full tilt, and controllable low-carbon electricity for the data center. Molten salt storage is hardly a novelty — concentrating solar thermal plants have leaned on it for years — yet the cost case turns out cleaner inside a nuclear plant, where the reactor was bound to run at full power regardless and storage simply converts surplus heat into flexibility someone will pay for. Two things bear watching: the identity of the first data center customer, due to be announced this year, and whether rival reactor designs begin offering heat storage as standard equipment. To the cloud providers and data center developers hunting for power nationwide, the signal is plain — a power source that can follow their load now counts nearly as much as its price.