Data Center Executives Cool on Nuclear: 'Still a Decade Out'

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland, May 5, 2025 – Small-scale nuclear reactors have been floated as a clean solution to power data centers, but executives said Monday the technology remains years away – and incompatible to meet the urgent power needs of today’s digital infrastructure.

“Nuclear is a decade out – and if you ask me in a decade, I’ll still say it’s a decade out,” said Josh Snowhorn, founder of Quantum Loophole, a developer of master-planned data center communities with integrated power, water, and network infrastructure.

“The technology is still years away,” added Arnab Ghosal, vice president and COO of Southern Telecom, one of the largest electricity and natural gas providers in the southeastern U.S. “We're big proponents of nuclear, but the technology's got to be efficient.”

The remarks came during a panel here at International Telecom Week focused on the trifecta of infrastructure bottlenecks affecting data center growth: electricity, land, and fiber. With nuclear still years out, panelists said the immediate crisis was securing power from an overburdened grid.

“We’ve gone to unprecedented load requests,” Ghosal said, noting that Southern was currently fielding 50 gigawatts of new energy requests — more than its total active supply of 44 GW. Only 10 gigawatts were considered realistically attainable, and even that would be constrained by transmission and buildout timelines.

Ghosal said his company was proud to have brought two new nuclear reactors online, the first in North America in decades, at the Vogtle site in Georgia. But he acknowledged the limitations of replicating that success at scale and speed.

To meet rising data center energy demands, Southern has extended the life of three coal-fired power plants in Mississippi and Georgia, adding 8.2 gigawatts of capacity.

“You're not hearing about coal shutting down anymore,” Ghosal said. “Everybody's environmental goals of emissions are kind of out the window, because everybody's just desperate for any kind of electron to light up whatever they need.” 

Snowhorn dismissed wind and solar as insufficient for primary workloads. “The sun doesn’t always shine. The wind doesn’t always blow,” he said, calling renewables useful “infill” options, but not suitable for 24/7 uptime requirements.

Batteries were discussed as part of an “all of the above” strategy — useful for temporary or supplemental load smoothing, but not yet scalable to solve firm capacity gaps.

Gas remains the most viable near-term generation source. Still, Snowhorn noted that natural gas turbines, like GE’s TM2500 units, used to be deployable in two to three years. “Now it’s five or six, because the pipelines are full and the manufacturers are backlogged,” he said.

Beyond power, panelists highlighted challenges with land availability, permitting delays, and community resistance – especially in fast-growing regions like Loudoun County, Virginia.

“Power was always there before – now it’s the first thing we check,” said Regis Malloy, Chief Growth Officer at Flexnode, which builds modular, prefabricated data centers. Malloy said their units can deploy next to substations and require less land, making them ideal for high-density AI workloads in constrained markets.

As energy demands press on, fiber access wasn’t a major concern for the panelists. 

“I don’t feel like fiber is a limiter,” said Royce Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer at Edged, a developer of sustainable, waterless-cooled data centers. “Fiber providers will build to where the data centers are.” Thomas pointed to aggressive long-haul overpulling by Lumen and Zayo as helping to meet bandwidth demand.

Still, much work remains to overcome misinformation and local opposition, said Mike DeVito, Chief Commercial Officer at VALORC3, which can slow down projects even in areas with sufficient resources.

“We need to do more to dispel the notion that our business is a pariah of electricity and water,” he said.

VALORC3 operates carrier-neutral data centers in tier-two markets like St. George, Utah; Boise, Idaho; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, regions where permitting moves faster and infrastructure isn’t yet maxed out.