Three US nuclear plants that were shut down for being too expensive to run are being restarted to serve AI data centers, with 2.25 gigawatts (GW, or a billion watts each) expected between 2027 and 2029. None is generating power today.
Palisades in Michigan is furthest along. It was already being decommissioned, which makes it the first reactor put back to work after dismantling began. It was loading fuel in August 2026 and is expected to produce 800 MW around March 2027. Crane Clean Energy Center, the Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, is projected at 835 MW sometime in 2027. Constellation Energy said it would spend $1.6 billion on the project and separately took a $1 billion Department of Energy loan in 2025. Microsoft has signed a 20-year contract as its main customer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still has to approve fuel loading. Unit 1 was retired in 2019, and it is not the unit that partially melted down in 1979.
Duane Arnold in Iowa, a joint effort between NextEra Energy and Google, is the slowest at 615 MW in 2029. NextEra's CEO, John Ketchum, said none of the costs fall on Iowa's residential customers.
The economics explain the timing. Labor and maintenance costs once made nuclear power pricier than the alternatives. Data center operators now appear willing to pay a premium for power they can get soon, since grid connections are a main blocker for new buildouts. Loans from the Energy Department, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, helped get the projects moving.
The math is less tidy than "2.25 GW" suggests. State forecasts for data center demand around 2030 are 1.2 to 2.3 GW in Michigan, 0.8 to 3.4 GW in Pennsylvania and 1.55 to 2.8 GW in Iowa. Added up, that is 3.55 to 8.5 GW, so the restarts would cover roughly 26% to 63% of it. The forecasts are loose, since they include data centers that may never be built. If demand lands at the low end, these three plants carry most of the load. If it lands at the high end, they are a down payment.