# AI companies have signed enough nuclear deals to power 7 million homes and uranium stocks are surging > Source: > Published: 2026-07-26 15:12:16+00:00 *AI has not made nuclear power simple. It has made it financeable, and that is why uranium stocks are moving again.* For years, nuclear power had a strange problem: plenty of governments liked it in speeches, but not enough customers were willing to sign the kind of contracts that make reactors, restarts and fuel supply pencil out. AI has changed that. Not with better rhetoric. With power bills. Forbes wrote in February that Microsoft and Amazon were turning to nuclear because AI data centers need power that runs all day, not only when the weather cooperates. You can see the same logic in the deals signed by Google, Meta and Amazon. The cloud used to sound weightless. Now it looks like a line of substations, cooling towers and transmission queues. The strongest example is still Microsoft. Bloomberg reported in May that the restart of the Three Mile Island site's Unit 1 reactor is moving ahead after Microsoft agreed to buy its output for data operations. Constellation Energy renamed the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center and has said the restart would add 835 megawatts of supply to PJM, with the unit expected back online in 2028. The $16 billion figure in the original draft was wrong as written: Constellation has described that number as estimated Pennsylvania GDP impact, while the restart spending figure cited in Bloomberg coverage was about $1.6 billion. That distinction matters. A reader shouldn't have to untangle deal value from economic-impact math. If you're weighing the AI power trade, the useful fact is the contract structure: Microsoft is taking 20 years of output from a reactor that closed in 2019 because it wasn't economic. A dead asset became useful again because AI demand made firm electricity valuable enough. ## The contracts are real, but the dates are messy Meta added a larger headline number in January 2026, when it announced agreements with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo tied to the grids supporting its Prometheus supercluster in New Albany, Ohio. Meta said those projects could support up to 6.6 gigawatts of new and existing clean energy by 2035. CBS, citing the Associated Press, reported that Prometheus is a one-gigawatt cluster expected to come online in 2026. That's not a small side project. It's the kind of load that forces a company to think like a utility customer years before the servers are fully installed. Google's nuclear move came earlier. In October 2024, Google signed what it called the first corporate agreement to buy nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors developed by Kairos Power. Kairos says the agreement targets up to 500 megawatts by 2035, starting with the Hermes 2 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 2030. Amazon's most concrete nuclear purchase is not X-energy. It is the June 2025 Talen Energy agreement, filed with the SEC, to supply 1,920 megawatts from the Susquehanna nuclear plant for Amazon Web Services operations in Pennsylvania. So the original article's claim that every major AI hyperscaler signed at least one nuclear power purchase agreement in 2026 was too neat. Microsoft signed in 2024. Google signed in 2024. Amazon's Susquehanna PPA came in 2025. Meta announced its new batch in 2026. The trend is current. The calendar was not. ## Governments are now chasing the same constraint Canada is moving too, though not exactly in the way the earlier draft described. Natural Resources Canada released a national nuclear strategy on June 22, 2026, led by Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson. The official release did not announce a plan to build 10 large reactors. It pointed instead to financing tools, uranium production and CANDU technology - and projects such as the Darlington New Nuclear Project in Bowmanville, Ontario. The same government release cited up to $2 billion from the Canada Growth Fund and $1 billion from the Building Ontario Fund for Darlington's small modular reactors. The U.S. policy picture is also more specific than a loose $80 billion claim. The Department of Energy said in May 2026 that its UPRISE initiative targets 2.5 gigawatts of added nuclear capacity by 2027 and 5 gigawatts by 2029, mainly through uprates and efficiency improvements at existing plants. Separately, the National Nuclear Security Administration selected Amentum on July 20, 2026 to negotiate a project pairing a one-gigawatt AI data center with on-site energy generation at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This is why uranium investors are paying attention. Sprott said uranium mining equities, measured by the Northshore Global Uranium Mining Index, were up 39.49% year-to-date as of January 31, 2026, while junior uranium miners were up 45.25%. More recently, Investor's Business Daily reported on July 22 that nuclear names rallied after a U.S.-Saudi nuclear agreement and a federal AI-reactor initiative, with Constellation up 4.8% intraday and Oklo and Nano Nuclear Energy both gaining more than 2%. Don't treat every uranium stock as the same bet. Cameco sells into an operating market. NexGen Energy is still a development story tied to its Rook I project in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin. Oklo has big demand language around it, but investors are now testing whether advanced reactor companies can turn agreements into plants that are actually licensed and running. That's the real issue. Goldman Sachs Research forecast in May that U.S. data center power demand would more than double to 66 gigawatts in 2027 from 31 gigawatts in 2025. If you're building AI infrastructure, power procurement is no longer a back-office detail. It is strategy. The companies that signed early have options. The ones that waited are now discovering that reactors and uranium mines don't arrive on startup timelines - and neither do the transmission lines needed to move the power. **Also read:** [Claude shared chats have been indexed by Google and anyone with a search bar can find them](https://startupfortune.com/claude-shared-chats-have-been-indexed-by-google-and-anyone-with-a-search-bar-can-find-them/), [Georgia Power is seizing family homes to build AI data center power lines and residents are calling it theft](https://startupfortune.com/georgia-power-is-seizing-family-homes-to-build-ai-data-center-power-lines-and-residents-are-calling-it-theft/), and [Singapore's Ropedia raises $30M to teach robots how to do chores by watching humans](https://startupfortune.com/singapores-ropedia-raises-30m-to-teach-robots-how-to-do-chores-by-watching-humans/)