By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Alphabet's Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said on Monday it signed the world's first corporate agreement to buy power from multiple small modular reactors to meet electricity demand for artificial intelligence.
The technology company's agreement with Kairos Power aims to bring Kairos' first small modular reactor online by 2030, followed by additional deployments through 2035.
The companies did not reveal financial details of the agreement or where in the U.S. the plants would be built. Google said it has agreed to buy a total of 500 megawatts of power from six to seven reactors, which is smaller than the output of today's nuclear reactors.
"We feel like nuclear can play an important role in helping to meet our demand ... cleanly in a way that's more around the clock," Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google, told reporters on a call.
Technology firms have signed several recent agreements with nuclear power companies this year as artificial intelligence boosts power demand for the first time in decades.
In March, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) purchased a nuclear-powered datacenter from Talen Energy. Last month, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Constellation Energy signed a power deal to help resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the worst U.S. nuclear accident in 1979.
U.S. data center power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) estimates, which assumed natural gas, wind and solar power would fill the gap.
Kairos will need to get full construction and design permitting from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as well as permits from local agencies, a process that can take years.
Kairos late last year got a construction permit from the NRC to build a demonstration reactor in Tennessee.
"The NRC is ready to efficiently and appropriately review applications for new reactors," said Scott Burnell, an NRC spokesperson.
Small modular reactors are intended to be smaller than today's reactors with components built in a factory, instead of onsite, to reduce construction costs.
Critics say SMRs will be expensive because they may not be able to achieve the economy of scale of larger plants. In addition, they will likely produce long-lasting nuclear waste for which the country does not yet have a final repository.
Google said by committing to a so-called order book framework with Kairos, instead of buying one reactor at a time, it is sending a demand signal to the market and making a long-term investment to speed development of SMRs.
"We're confident that this novel approach is going to improve the prospects of our projects being delivered on cost and on schedule," said Mike Laufer, CEO and co-founder of Kairos.