New York state is getting more nuclear reactors as officials look for additional power sources.
Gov. Kathy Hochul tells The New York Times that she has ordered the state’s electric utility to add no less than 1 gigawatt of new nuclear power generation to its collection of older reactors. That could be a lure for corporate development – particularly for those artificial intelligence companies and businesses that host data centers.
“I’m going to lean into making sure that every company that wants to come to New York and everyone who wants to live here will never have to worry about reliability and affordability when it comes to their utility costs,” she said.
The new reactor will be built in upstate New York, but an exact location has yet to be determined.
This will be the first new major nuclear plant built in the U.S. in more than 15 years. The Trump administration has been pushing hard for more nuclear reactors since January, promising to fast track permitting for the projects. Permitting, previously, has been a major hurdle for nuclear facilities, with the process often taking up to a decade.
Since 1991, only five commercial reactors have come online in the U.S. Several more have been retired, resulting in a decline in capacity since 2012.
Many private businesses are partnering to bring nuclear facilities back online. Google, last October, partnered with Kairos Power to back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors in the U.S. That came just weeks after Microsoft announced a partnership with Constellation Energy that will see the undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, resume operations to power Microsoft’s AI data centers.
Experts have warned data centers could become a big strain on the U.S. power grid, with the nine-year projected growth forecast for North America essentially doubling from where it stood a year ago. Last year, the five-year forecast from Grid Strategies projected growth of 2.6%. That number has since nearly doubled to 4.7%—and planners expect peak demand to grow by 38 gigawatts. In real-world terms, that’s sufficient to power 12.7 million homes.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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