Samsung C&T invests $100M in Kairos Power nuclear reactor for Google

Securing a veteran engineering partner like Samsung C&T, which has completed a dozen global nuclear projects, provides the technical expertise necessary to meet aggressive 2030 timelines. For the streaming and cloud ecosystem, this partnership signals a shift toward vertically integrated energy solutions to insulate data center costs from volatile utility markets. As AI-driven workloads increase power consumption, reliable carbon-free baseload energy becomes a competitive requirement for infrastructure providers. Watch for the operational status of the Hermes 1 low-power demonstrator as the primary indicator that Kairos can successfully transition its fluoride salt-cooled technology from lab to field.

Kairos Power has been building a broad coalition of technology and energy partners around its fluoride salt-cooled reactor design. In October 2024, Google signed a power purchase agreement with Kairos Power for up to 500 megawatts of nuclear capacity across multiple small modular reactors, marking the first corporate agreement to purchase power from a fleet of SMRs. That deal established Google as Kairos Power's anchor customer and set the commercial framework that Samsung C&T's investment now supports on the engineering side. The Hermes 1 demonstration unit in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, received its construction permit from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November 2025, making it the first non-light-water reactor to clear that regulatory hurdle in decades.

The business case for nuclear-powered data centers has attracted significant capital across the sector. Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy in September 2024 to restart the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, providing 835 megawatts of carbon-free baseload power starting in 2028. Amazon followed with its own nuclear strategy, acquiring a 960-megawatt data center campus adjacent to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in March 2025, a deal that gave the cloud provider direct access to behind-the-meter nuclear generation. These moves illustrate the competitive pressure driving hyperscalers toward firm carbon-free energy rather than intermittent renewables alone.

On the technical side, Kairos Power's TRISO fuel and molten salt coolant differentiate it from competing SMR designs that buyers and investors are also evaluating. X-energy's Xe-100 reactor, another TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas-cooled design, received NRC construction permit approval in January 2025 for a deployment with Dow Chemical in Texas. Meanwhile, TerraPower's Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor broke ground in Wyoming in June 2024, backed by Bill Gates and targeting commercial operation by 2030. For streaming and cloud infrastructure planners, the proliferation of competing SMR technologies means multiple pathways to firm carbon-free power are advancing simultaneously, though none will deliver meaningful capacity before 2028 at the earliest. Other firms are exploring alternative baseload sources, such as Mazama Energy geothermal funding to support growing infrastructure needs.