Facebook parent Meta signed deals this week with three U.S. utilities to buy enough electricity to power 6 million homes by 2035 – another tailwind for nuclear energy demand and uranium.
The agreements announced Friday, which cover up to 6.6 gigawatts of power, are with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo. They will support Meta operations as well as its Prometheus supercluster, a huge set of artificial intelligence servers located in New Albany, Ohio.
Meta’s new power commitments come as Canadian investment trust Sprott this week disclosed new purchases of physical uranium for its dedicated fund.
The deals would allow Meta to source power from Vistra’s plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania and future supply from TerraPower and Oklo’s planned facilities in Wyoming and Ohio. Meta didn’t provide financial details of the agreements.
“Our agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo, and Constellation make Meta one of the most significant corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a release. “State-of-the-art data centers and AI infrastructure are essential to securing America’s position as a global leader in AI.”
The projects will create “thousands” of skilled jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania, add new energy to the grid, extend the life of three existing nuclear plants and accelerate new reactor technologies, Meta says.
The power agreements come just over seven months after Meta signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy (Nasdaq: CEG) to buy about 1.12 Gw from its Clinton nuclear plant in central Illinois. That amount can power about 1 million homes.
More uranium purchases
Uranium, the key ingredient in nuclear power, continues to be a hot commodity, with the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (TSX: U.U for USD; U.UN for CAD) buying 300,000 lb. of the energy metal over the last week. After buying 100,000 lb. of physical uranium last Friday, the trust on Thursday bought another 200,000 lb. to bring its total holdings to about 75.2 million pounds.
The purchases bring to 450,000 lb. Sprott’s uranium buys so far this year, its highest first-quarter level since 2023, BMO Capital Markets analyst Helen Amos said in a note on Friday.
The market value of its uranium totals about $6.17 billion.
The spot uranium price was flat Friday at $82 per lb. though still at its highest level since the end of October. The price logged a 12% rise over 2025, ending the year at $81.55 per pound.
Going nuclear
Power agreements such as Meta’s are occurring against a wider political backdrop favouring nuclear energy. President Donald Trump wants new nuclear reactors to be a cornerstone achievement of his second term.
The U.S. Energy Department has already awarded $800 million for new reactor technologies and offered $1 billion in loan guarantees in November to restart Constellation’s Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania.
But the industry’s recent track record exposes the challenges and costs of those ambitions. NuScale, once seen as the early leader to deliver the first small modular reactor (SMR) in the U.S., was forced to cancel its Idaho project in November 2023 after utilities walked away from power-purchase agreements because costs rose too high.
AI spurs nuclear revival
“Historically, new nuclear plants have been completed behind schedule and over budget,” the Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based non-partisan think tank supporting the clean energy transition, said in a November report. “Recent nuclear projects around the world reflect this trend, with new facilities typically coming online six years late and at double the initial estimated cost.”
However, the nuclear industry is today being buoyed by something it lacked in the early 2000s, when delays and soaring budgets last derailed hopes of a nuclear revival: deep-pocketed technology companies, whose investments in AI are bringing capital and urgency back to the sector.
After being roughly flat for years, demand for power by data centres is projected to surge 175% by 2030 from 2023 levels, Goldman Sachs Research said in December.
Ontario leads the charge
Ontario, which uses the most nuclear power in Canada, is planning four 300 MW SMRs at Darlington, four large 1,200 MW units at the existing Bruce Power nuclear site and eight large 1,000 MW units at Wesleyville on the site of an unfinished oil-fired power plant. Together, these projects would add 14,000 MW of new generation capacity to Ontario’s grid, more than Ontario’s currently installed nuclear capacity.
“Ontario has demonstrated its expertise in delivering refurbishments of nuclear units on time, which extends their lifespans,” Pembina lead author David Pickup wrote. “However, building new nuclear plants is fundamentally different to refurbishing existing ones, involving greater complexity, new regulatory frameworks, and engineering challenges that far exceed those encountered in refurbishment projects.”
The Darlington SMRs will also be the first grid-scale build in a G7 country, he said.
“This only increases the likelihood of a delay and cost overruns, with ratepayers ultimately taking on this risk.”
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