uclear power is staging a comeback in the U.S. — largely due to the voracious energy demands of AI — and Meta just became one of the largest corporate buyers of nuclear power in U.S. history.
On Friday, the company announced that it had signed three deals with nuclear companies to onboard 6.6 GW of power by 2035. This energy boost is particularly needed for Meta's AI factories, including its AI supercluster, "Prometheus," which is scheduled to come online later in 2026 in New Albany, Ohio.
One of Meta's three deals is with Vistra to increase power production at existing plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio that will help power Prometheus. The other two deals are with Oklo and TerraPower to create "safer, advanced nuclear reactors" and accelerate the development of next-gen nuclear technologies.
Bill Gates is a key investor in TerraPower. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a lead investor in Oklo and stepped down as chairman of the board of directors in 2025 so the company could sign up more AI customers that compete with OpenAI.
For context, Meta already runs 30 data centers worldwide. But an AI factory typically needs at least 5-10x the power of a traditional data center. There are several reasons why: GPUs demand significantly more power than CPUs, AI training and workloads typically have higher utilization, they run 24/7 unlike traditional data centers that support more peaks during working hours, and they need additional cooling.
A traditional data center uses 100 MW or less of power, while AI factories are now scaling up to 1 GW or more. That's enough energy to power about 800,000 homes, roughly the equivalent of the entire city of San Francisco or the state of New Mexico. And Meta has even larger ambitions with its Hyperion supercluster in Louisiana that will start at 2 GW of power, scale up to 5 GW over time, and be nearly the same size as Manhattan.
That's why Zuckerberg needs to onboard enough energy to power these behemoths.