Meta buys nuclear power that won't exist for years

Meta announced on Friday what it called a landmark set of agreements with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo, covering up to 6.6GW of nuclear power for its Ohio-area data centres, including the Prometheus AI supercluster in New Albany. The scale is genuinely large: Meta says the deals make it one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in US history. But the announcement also illustrates a widening gap between how fast hyperscalers say they need power and how fast nuclear can actually supply it.

Only the Vistra portion delivers anything close to immediately, in the form of 20-year purchase agreements for output from operating plants. Meta’s deal with Vistra involves 20-year power purchase agreements for 2,176 MW of nuclear energy and capacity from the operating Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio, plus the purchase of energy from uprates at those two plants and the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania. That is existing, licensed capacity being rerouted, not new supply.

The TerraPower and Oklo arrangements are a different kind of bet: financing for reactors that do not yet exist. The TerraPower deal provides funding to support the development of up to eight Natrium sodium fast reactors, including two new units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032, plus rights for energy from up to six other units. Meta’s agreement with Oklo will advance the development of an entirely new advanced nuclear technology campus in Pike County, Ohio, which may come online as early as 2030. The plans for the scalable powerhouse facility are expected to expand incrementally to deliver up to the full target of 1.2 GW by 2034. Meta and the developers frame this differently: the money is meant to give young reactor firms the balance-sheet certainty to actually build at scale, something the industry has struggled to secure without a large anchor customer willing to take on early-stage risk.

Prometheus itself is expected to come online in 2026, consuming at least a gigawatt from day one.

That mismatch is the real story here. Meta is not solving its near-term power problem with this announcement; it is pre-committing capital to a nuclear buildout that assumes AI compute demand will still be worth chasing into the 2030s, while the gigawatts it needs today almost certainly come from gas, grid draw and whatever existing nuclear output it can redirect. Whether that reads as prudent long-term planning or as a hedge against an AI cycle that may not last is, for now, a matter of which half of the deal you choose to look at.