Asger Risom
Federal regulators are fast-tracking the restart of Three Mile Island to 2027, backed by a $1 billion federal loan, as Microsoft and Meta race to lock up the country’s nuclear grid for their AI data centers.
When Microsoft first announced it was reviving the dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant back in 2024, it felt like a distant, wildly ambitious vanity project. But the reality of the artificial intelligence boom has officially hit the American power grid, and the government is now actively tearing up red tape to get that reactor turned back on as fast as physically possible.
According to recent reporting, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just approved Constellation Energy’s request to aggressively fast-track the plant’s revival. Thanks to that regulatory waiver and a massive $1 billion federal loan secured from the Department of Energy from 2025, the newly rebranded “Crane Clean Energy Center” is now slated to come back online in 2027—a full year ahead of its original schedule, and well before previous 2031 projections.
The sudden rush comes down entirely to the brutal physics of modern computing. The massive, highly autonomous AI agents that Silicon Valley is currently shoving into every piece of enterprise software are notoriously thirsty. You simply cannot power a hyperscale data center running endless, recursive large language models on intermittent wind and solar alone. The infrastructure requires a massive, unblinking stream of firm baseload power.
A 20-year atomic monopoly
Microsoft didn’t just invest in the plant’s revival; they signed a 20-year power purchase agreement that locks up every single watt of the reactor’s 835-megawatt output. And this isn’t a one-off anomaly. The tech industry’s desperation for firm power is sparking a nationwide atomic gold rush. Just this summer, Constellation signed another massive 20-year deal with Meta to supply 1,100 megawatts from its Clinton, Illinois nuclear plant, entirely dedicating the facility to feeding Mark Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions.
While the electricity from Three Mile Island will technically flow into the regional PJM grid, the underlying financial mechanism is clear: tech monopolies are single-handedly subsidizing the resurrection of the American nuclear grid just to ensure they don’t run out of electricity.
For everyday consumers living near these data hubs, the collateral damage is already hitting their wallets. The surge in data center demand is actively driving up utility bills, with residential electricity costs spiking by nearly 15 percent in Virginia and a staggering 89 percent in neighboring Maryland over the past year.
For years, software companies bragged about operating in the lightweight, frictionless “cloud.” Now, the cloud has gotten so unbelievably heavy that the government is handing out billion-dollar loans to restart dormant atomic reactors just to keep it afloat. We have reached the point where a tech monopoly is accelerating a nuclear revival just to ensure your company’s automated PowerPoint generator doesn’t experience a server timeout.
