Electric turbine giant GE Vernova is partnering with the nuclear startup Blue Energy to supply a Texas data center project with gas-fueled electricity and nuclear power — as part of a single energy station.
The announcement Tuesday that the companies are partnering to generate 2.5 gigawatts of power comes as the energy industry grows increasingly skeptical that nuclear reactors can be built fast enough to power the artificial intelligence industry’s largest data centers. It took more than a decade to build the most recent nuclear units to come online in the United States.
But Blue Energy says it has a fix: Burn natural gas before the nuclear station is built.
“We basically did that to accelerate commercial operation dates and to enable project financing on a first-of-the-kind nuclear project, which reduces our cost of capital. It basically catalyzes nuclear using gas financially,” Jake Jurewicz, co-founder and CEO of Maryland-based Blue Energy, said in an interview. “It buys us at least two years of acceleration on producing power by doing this gas-to-nuclear.”
