Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is soliciting bids from nuclear developers to deliver between 1 and 4 Gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity by the early 2030s.
This is a novel approach. Rather than making a deal with an existing facility, or making an agreement with a specific company, Meta is starting a competition. This should allow the company to assess a potential range of designs from different nuclear developers to see which reactor designs best conform to their goals—including timeframe and costs.
In their announcement, Meta highlights their need for reliable baseload power as a reason for soliciting bids specifically from nuclear companies, writing, “We believe that nuclear energy can help provide firm, baseload power to support the growth needs of the electric grids that power both our data centers (the physical infrastructure on which Meta’s platforms operate) as well as the communities around them.”
Nuclear power is particularly attractive to companies operating data centers because they require round-the-clock power; and nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of any source, operating more than 92% of the time, on average.
One of nuclear power’s longstanding barriers is the upfront capital intensity of these projects. They are expensive to build with most of the costs bearing out before power is generated. This obstacle, combined with an overly burdensome regulatory environment, deters nuclear developers from building more than one plant. Plant Vogtle in Georgia is an example of this.
Meta’s announcement indicates that this is a reason it has chosen to take this approach, “as scaling deployments of nuclear technology offers the best chance of rapidly reducing cost, engaging with a partner across projects and locations will allow us to ensure that we can deploy strategically.” Meta is hopeful that requesting proposals in this manner will allow this to be more of a consideration in the process.
If this process results in a long-term partnership between Meta and a nuclear company, it may allow them to reduce costs by repeatedly building the same design.
Momentum for constructing new nuclear power plants is coming from major tech companies. Nuclear deals, ranging from Microsoft and Constellation Energy agreeing to reopen Unit 1 of Three Mile Island to an agreement between Kairos Power and Google, could make building more of this reliable energy source viable.
What makes Meta’s nuclear approach unique is soliciting a bidding process rather than making a more standard deal with a specific firm. It will be interesting to see what eventually comes of this because Meta is open to a range of plant designs and sizes. Because they’re accepting bids in a competitive way, their ultimate choice may be revealing as to which companies or designs can best compete on cost and timeline.