Sabey considers Natrium deployment at its data centres

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

The strategic collaboration includes exploring new Natrium plants in the Rocky Mountain region, as well as Texas, to support growing power needs for Sabey Data Centers-owned data centres. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) will explore multiple project execution structures to meet the exponential demand in data centre energy needs with TerraPower's Natrium technology.

SDC - one of the largest privately-owned multi-tenant data centre owners/developers/operators in the USA - is a joint venture between Sabey Corporation and National Real Estate Advisors LLC, acting as the investment manager on behalf of its institutional clients. 

"At its heart, TerraPower is an innovation-driven company, and we are thrilled to collaborate with Sabey to address the surging energy demands of data centres with clean, reliable and adaptable solutions like the Natrium technology," said TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque. "The energy sector is transforming at an unprecedented pace after decades of business as usual, and meaningful progress will require strategic collaboration across industries. Together, we can ensure advanced nuclear technology plays a vital role in securing a clean, resilient energy grid."

SDC President Tim Mirick said: "Sabey Data Centers is dedicated to pioneering sustainable energy solutions to support our customers' growth. Our strategic collaboration with TerraPower represents a substantial move toward integrating clean, innovative power technologies into the heart of our operations."

"This strategic relationship exemplifies the forward-thinking collaboration necessary to meet the evolving energy demands of our digital future," added Jeffrey Kanne, vice chairman of SDC and President and CEO of National Real Estate Advisors.

Natrium technology features a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor using high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel, with a molten salt-based energy storage system that can boost the system's output to 500 MWe for more than five and a half hours when needed.

"The energy storage system is designed to keep base output steady, ensuring constant reliability, and can quickly ramp up when demand peaks - it is the only advanced reactor design with this unique feature, and is well suited to meet the power demands of data centres," TerraPower said.

According to the company, the growth of AI and data centres is projected to increase US electricity demand by 323 TWh by 2030.

The agreement between TerraPower and SDC follows several announcements by global tech giants related to nuclear energy.

Microsoft announced in September it had signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation that will see Three Mile Island unit 1 restarted. Google announced in October it had agreed to purchase energy from Kairos Power under a deal that would support the first commercial deployment of its fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature advanced small modular reactors by 2030 and aim for a fleet totalling 500 MW of capacity by 2035. Amazon also announced a series of agreements that will see it taking a stake in advanced nuclear reactor developer X-energy and rolling out its Xe-100 advanced SMR initially at a project in Washington State. In December, US nuclear power plant developer Oklo signed a non-binding Master Power Agreement with data centre designer, builder and operator Switch to deploy 12 GW of Oklo Aurora powerhouse projects by 2044. Earlier this month, Deep Fission and Endeavour Energy LLC committed to co-develop 2 GW of nuclear energy to power Endeavour's expanding portfolio of data centres.

TerraPower - a company largely funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates - noted it is the first and only advanced nuclear developer with a permit application for a commercial advanced reactor submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That application was submitted in March 2024 and is on track for approval in December 2026.

TerraPower is constructing the Natrium demonstration plant near a retiring coal facility at Kemmerer in Wyoming. A ground-breaking ceremony held in June last year marked the start of non-nuclear construction at the site. Nuclear construction will begin after the application is approved: the company is eyeing the start of work on the nuclear island in 2026.