Dead Nuclear Plants Are Coming Back, and Big Tech Is Paying for Them

For 30 years, nuclear power was the energy source nobody wanted to pay for. In the space of a few weeks, the richest companies in the world have started paying for it on two continents.

For 30 years, nuclear power was the energy source nobody wanted to pay for. In the space of a few weeks, the richest companies in the world have started paying for it on two continents.

The decline was long and steep. Nuclear plants supplied 17.5% of the world’s electricity in 1996. By 2025 that share had fallen to 9%, according to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.¹ Reactors closed, new projects ran over budget, and investors learned to look elsewhere.

Now look at what happened this fall. Within about six weeks, Google committed to nuclear power on two continents, a shuttered American reactor won federal financing, and new reactor designs crossed real milestones.

Google goes nuclear, twice

On September 9, Google signed its first nuclear power deal in Europe. It will take up to half the output of Fortum’s Loviisa plant in Finland from 2030 through 2049, starting at reduced levels in 2028.²

Four weeks later, on October 6, it signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation for 890 megawatts of new capacity, to be squeezed out of 11 existing American reactors through upgrades backed by $4.3 billion of Constellation investment. A separate 15-year deal covers another 2,700 megawatts.³ The structure is worth noticing. Google is not waiting a decade for a new plant. It is paying to squeeze more output from reactors that already exist, which avoids the long wait of building from scratch.

✓ Trusted partner One research team says it has identified where the money in this race for nuclear power is most likely to flow, and it is sharing its findings with readers →

Those are not pilot projects. They are decades-long commitments from one of the most cash-rich companies on earth, and they run on both sides of the Atlantic.

Reactors back from the dead

The most striking part of the revival is not new plants. It is old ones coming back. In Iowa, the 615-megawatt Duane Arnold plant, shut down years ago, is being prepared to restart. On September 8, the Department of Energy closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion for the project. The restart is targeted for early 2029 and is backed by a 25-year power agreement with Google. It still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.⁴ A plant that was written off now has a federal loan and a quarter-century contract from one of the largest companies in the world. That is a revaluation few industries ever see.

In Michigan, the Palisades plant cleared a hurdle last week, when workers retrieved a fuel assembly that had tipped about 30 degrees in August, allowing fuel loading to resume. Its owner has not set a restart date, but it has a contract commitment to begin selling power by March 1, 2027.⁵

New designs are moving too. In the past week, X-energy, Amazon and the utility AEP said they are studying a site in Sullivan County, Indiana, for 12 small modular reactors totaling 960 megawatts, with Amazon funding development. It is still at the feasibility stage.⁶ And by July 4, four advanced reactors had reached criticality under the Energy Department’s program, beating the goal of three set in a May 2025 executive order.⁷ Small modular reactors are designed to be built in factories and shipped in pieces, which supporters say will cut the cost and delay that have dogged large plants. The economics still have to be proven at scale.

Why now

The reason is the same everywhere: electricity demand that nobody planned for. The Energy Information Administration expects U.S. power use to reach records in both 2026 and 2027, with commercial demand driven by data centers.⁸ McKinsey has estimated that data center capital spending could reach $6.7 trillion by 2030.⁹

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AI data centers need power around the clock, and they need it without the carbon that many of their owners have promised to avoid. Nuclear is one of very few sources that delivers both. That is why the same technology companies that once bought wind and solar credits are now signing 20 and 25-year nuclear contracts. Unlike wind and solar, a nuclear plant runs at close to full output around the clock, whatever the weather. For a data center that never sleeps, that reliability is worth paying for.

A race between nations

It is not only companies. As of March, 38 countries had signed a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050, with China, Brazil, Italy and Belgium among the most recent to join.¹⁰ When governments and the largest companies in the world want the same scarce thing at the same time, that is a resource race. Countries that spent years shutting reactors are now competing for the same engineers, components and fuel.

Races like this tend to reward the suppliers of whatever is scarce: the fuel, the components, the engineering, the sites and the operators that can actually deliver megawatts. Many of those businesses spent the last three decades out of favor, which is exactly why some of them may still be priced for the old story.

The fuel is part of it. Every new reactor, restart and upgrade needs uranium, and at the end of September Cameco’s long-term uranium price indicator stood at 96.50, above the spot indicator at 89.63.¹¹ Utilities signing long contracts are paying more than the day’s price to lock in supply. The companies best placed in a race like this are not always the famous ones.

There are risks. Restarts depend on regulators, projects slip, and a single safety incident can change public opinion overnight. But the direction has clearly turned. After 30 years of decline, nuclear power is being bought again, on long contracts, by customers who can pay. For investors, the signal is in the length of the contracts.