Clayco, a Chicago-based ENR Top 4-ranked design-build firm specializing in complex mission-critical facilities, has partnered in a multidisciplinary consortium led by Swiss-US energy company Deep Atomic to potentially create the nation’s first nuclear power data center to provide a computing backbone for hyperscale artificial intelligence users.
Clayco is supporting the consortium’s submissions to the US Department of Energy to develop a next-generation nuclear-powered AI data center and accompanying energy infrastructure campus. They include a proposed facility at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which, pending department approval, could represent the first fully integrated nuclear power AI data center in the US.
“We are partnering [Deep Atomic]… to really think about everything from strategy, to deployment, to building capacity in the data center, [and] pre-construction analysis … really just supporting and preparing for what are expected to be really exciting projects,” says Ryan McGuire, president of Clayco and its Clayco Compute division, which specializes in mission-critical facilities such as data centers and other hyperscale customer projects.
McGuire says Clayco supports the data center scope by providing early stage delivery planning, build capability analysis and integrated build design expertise to inform the DOE submission process. This includes how the campus could be designed, engineered and built, from the initial site development strategy through to the construction phase and sequencing. The Clayco Compute division is involved in the construction of 57 active data centers in the US and has delivered more than $12.7-billions in mission-critical facilities, offering hyperscale customers like Amazon and Microsoft end-to-end solutions for building these projects, he adds.
“All that accumulated knowledge is definitely beneficial,” says McGuire. “Every neutron is currently required to help fill some of the gaps that all hyperscalers will have, and that [nuclear power] it’s a great solution for that.”
Microsoft has already announced another DOE project that will seek to renovate and reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to power one of its data center campuses. The department has identified 16 sites on federal land in the United States for data center development.
Deep Atomic is advancing an integrated energy approach that combines modern nuclear power with AI data center infrastructure and does not require a reactor the size of power generation facilities such as the undamaged former Three Mile Island unit.
“Our mission is to accelerate the deployment of advanced nuclear power solutions that meet the performance, reliability and sustainability needs of next-generation IT infrastructure,” says William GJ Theron, founder and CEO of Deep Atomic. “Working with Clayco and our consortium partners, we are submitting a proposal to the DOE that combines practical execution planning with innovative energy and data center integration.”
McGuire says that with the energy demands of modern hyperscale customers and the power generation capacity of the U.S. power grid that many of these projects are being built to connect to, an alternative energy supply will be necessary, possibly by the end of the decade.
“There’s a big projected shortfall of what the utilities can contribute, and we’ve sat down with all of our customers over the last couple of months and just shown them their new capacity projections, their new demand projections. It’s overwhelming,” he says. “It just continues to have this dramatic growth, and the only way that growth is going to be realized is by providing a lot of these alternative solutions, still partnering with the utilities because they’re going to play a very important role, but bringing your own power. Having your own microgrid system has to play a role.”
