| Datacentre developments Meta opts for the nuclear option
TerraPower and Meta have announced an agreement to develop up to eight sodium cooled Natrium fast-reactors-with-energy-storage in the United States. This would provide Meta with up to 2.8 GW of carbon- free, baseload energy, the company says, with the Natrium technology’s innovative built-in energy storage system providing the capacity to boost total output to 4 GW of power. Under this commercial agreement, Meta will provide funding to support the deployment of the Natrium plants, with delivery of initial units as early as 2032. This is Meta’s largest support of advanced nuclear technologies to date. “To successfully address growing energy demand, we must deploy gigawatts of advanced nuclear energy in the 2030s. This agreement with Meta is designed to support the rapid deployment of our Natrium technology that provides the reliable, flexible, and carbon- free power our country needs,” said Chris Levesque, TerraPower president and CEO. “With our first Natrium plant under development, we have completed our design, established our supply chain, and cleared key regulatory milestones. These successes mean our TerraPower team is well-positioned to deliver on this historic multi-unit delivery agreement.” “Meta is committed to supporting innovative energy solutions that can deliver
units, with rights for energy provided to Meta for up to six additional Natrium units. Each Natrium reactor provides 345 MW of baseload power, with built-in energy storage that can ramp power up to 500 MW for over five hours. A dual Natrium unit can provide 690 MW of firm power, and up to 1 GW of dispatchable electricity. The companies say they will target identification of a specific site for the initial dual reactor unit in the coming months.
Visualisation of the basic Natrium concept. (Image: TerraPower)
reliable, scalable, and clean power for our operations and the communities we serve. This agreement with TerraPower – the result of Meta’s nuclear RFP process, which identified leading developers of nuclear energy to help us advance our energy goals - marks a significant step forward in advancing next-generation nuclear technology. Supporting new nuclear energy generation spurs job growth, drives innovation in our local communities, and reinforces America’s leadership in energy technology,” said Urvi Parekh, director of global energy, Meta. The agreement supports the early development activities for two new Natrium
TerraPower describes Natrium, a TerraPower and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy technology, as a “first mover” in the advanced reactor sector and believes it is leading the industry in its commercial readiness to support growing energy demand for data centres.
TerraPower has begun construction (albeit on non-nuclear parts of the power plant) in Wyoming on what it calls the first commercial-scale, advanced nuclear project in the United States, which is expected to be complete in 2030. TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates and a group of “like-minded visionaries”, says its Natrium plant design is the only commercial advanced nuclear technology with a complete environmental impact statement and final safety review, as part of a construction permit application pending with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Data centre growth and change in 2026: GlobalData perspective
The data centre market is experiencing unprecedented growth and changing dramatically, GlobalData analysis suggests. In 2025, talk of the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble grew stronger, with frontier projects such as Stargate dominating the headlines. Meanwhile, server densities continued to grow to satisfy the voracious demand for compute placed by AI workloads. As a result, electrical grids are under unprecedented pressure, creating environmental and economic concerns.
The industry is building ahead of projected demand to secure capacity, and financial models are evolving, with private capital playing a growing role in the industry. These trends will accelerate in 2026. The pipeline of large-scale data centre projects will continue to grow in 2026. GlobalData estimates there is currently a global pipeline of large-scale data centre projects with a total value of $2.31 billion. Data centres have become the backbone of economic competitiveness and a focus
of geopolitical interest, driven by the AI revolution that started in late-2022. The semiconductor space will continue to evolve, with new entrants in the market trying to capitalise on the growing inference opportunity, as the technological landscape evolves, and more enterprises deploy generative AI (GenAI) in production environments, says GlobaData. Greater adoption will also drive edge computing forward, as real-time workloads accelerate the need for localised data centre infrastructure to support latency-sensitive applications. With the changes that will take place, innovation will continue apace, the GlobalData analysis predicts. Liquid cooling technologies will evolve to help dissipate heat in increasingly dense environments. Modular, pre-engineered AI systems that can be added to existing data centres with minimal disruption will increasingly be marketed to help meet demand for compute. AI workloads will grow their presence and expand from AI labs to enterprise environments, a trend that
will continue to shape the data centre market. Some key takeaways
● GlobalData estimates there is currently a global pipeline of large-scale data center projects with a total value of $2.31 trillion. Some 64% of those projects remain in the early stages of pre-planning and planning.
● 2026 will witness strong growth in inference-optimised chips. Although GPUs will continue to claim the largest share of the overall market, the growing focus on efficiency will also drive demand for ASIC- based accelerators.
● Liquid cooling will be increasingly common for high-density racks (50–100 kW) with a progressively bifurcated landscape, with AI workloads opting for liquid cooling and traditional IT legacy environments leveraging air cooling.
Source: 2026 Enterprise Predictions: Data Centres, an advisory report from Global Data, owner of Modern Power Systems. Contact the analyst:
beatriz.valle@
globaldata.com
www.modernpowersystems.com | January/February 2026 | 27
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