Three shuttered US nuclear plants are being brought back online with federal loans totalling $4.42 billion, and the demand driving it is AI data centres. Palisades in Michigan takes $1.52 billion to Holtec for 800 MW, with the loan closed in September 2024. The Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania - the former Three Mile Island Unit 1 - takes $1.0 billion to Constellation for 835 MW, closed November 2025. Duane Arnold in Iowa takes $1.9 billion to NextEra Energy for 615 MW, closed September 2026.
Combined, that is 2.25 GW of firm, always-on generation returning to the grid. Reporting ties Microsoft to Crane and Google to Duane Arnold, though the loan documents name the utilities rather than the offtakers. Restart target dates have not been published for any of the three; the dates above are loan closings, not switch-ons.
The reason AI buyers want these specific assets is that nuclear output does not vary with weather or time of day, which matters when a training cluster draws the same load at 3am as at noon. Restarting a plant that already has a site, a licence history and transmission is also years faster than building new. It is worth holding that against the pipeline numbers published the same week: Bernstein assesses only around 35% of the planned US data centre pipeline as credible.