NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa.
Google said last October it would help bring the shuttered plant back into operation.
A second loan of its kind
The loan is the second of its type, suggesting the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies powering AI data centres.
Last year, the Department of Energy extended a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island.
Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly said the Iowa plant's restart in 2029 will "drive down electricity costs", though he did not explain the mechanism behind that claim.
Who actually gets the power
NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said during an earnings call last year that just 50 megawatts of the plant's output will be set aside for the local power cooperative.
That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa's electricity demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released.
Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centres near the site.
Why the plant closed in the first place
Duane Arnold has not operated since 2020, when an intense rainstorm damaged the facility.
Rather than repair it, NextEra chose to mothball the plant, at a time when cheap natural gas was flooding the market and making nuclear power economically unappealing.
Why the economics have flipped
A lot has changed in the six years since, as the rapid growth of AI, combined with wider electrification of the economy, has left utilities scrambling for new sources of power.
New data centres are expected to nearly triple the sector's electricity demand by 2035.
Shuttered nuclear plants have become one of the tech industry's preferred ways to secure clean, reliable power quickly.
A pattern across the industry
Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy two years ago to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island that last ran in 2019, with the reactor due back online in 2028 and expected to generate 835 megawatts.
In Illinois, Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center was at risk of closure before Meta became its customer, buying the clean energy attributes from the 1.1 gigawatt plant while its electricity continues to flow to the local grid.
Meta's own Hyperion AI data centre will separately need the equivalent of 10 natural gas power plants to operate, and if completed would consume more electricity than all of South Dakota.
The limits of the strategy
Duane Arnold is smaller than either of those facilities, though refurbishment will add 14 megawatts to its output, bringing its total capacity to 615 megawatts.
Together, the three plants represent what a Utility Dive report describes as the lowest-hanging fruit available in the United States.
A handful of other candidates exist, including San Onofre in California, but these have been shuttered for longer and would require significantly more work to bring back online.
