Oracle announced a 1-gigawatt data center powered by three small modular nuclear reactors for hyperscale AI workloads.

Oracle has secured building permits for a trio of small modular reactors (SMRs) to power a datacenter with over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity, Oracle founder, chair and CTO Larry Ellison revealed during the company's quarterly earnings call on Monday. The company did not disclose when the gigawatt-class datacenters and their SMRs will come online.

SMRs are miniaturized nuclear reactors designed similarly to those used in US naval vessels for nearly 70 years. Unlike marine reactors, SMRs are designed to be mass produced and, unlike conventional reactor designs, will not require massive physical infrastructure. In theory they will therefore be less expensive to operate, while still capable of producing tens or hundreds of megawatts of energy. However, no SMR is currently operating and pilot projects have not gone well, suggesting this represents Oracle's aspiration for nuclear power rather than an imminent deployment.

Oracle's interest in SMRs reflects its broader datacenter expansion strategy. According to Ellison, "Oracle has 162 cloud datacenters, live and under construction throughout the world. The largest of these datacenters is 800 megawatts, and it will contain acres of Nvidia GPU clusters able to train the world's largest AI models." Ellison stated that "Soon Oracle will begin construction of datacenters that are more than a gigawatt." Even under the most optimistic timelines, industry observers estimate first SMR deployments in the early 2030s.

SMRs face significant headwinds to deployment. In May, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that SMRs were "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels." Nevertheless, major cloud providers are embracing nuclear power. Amazon acquired Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter in a $650 million deal earlier this year; co-located alongside the 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant, the acquisition guarantees Amazon access to as much as 960 megawatts of capacity. Microsoft has also invested in SMRs, hiring someone to oversee their deployment.