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Small Modular Reactors in 2026: Order Books, AI Off-take, and the Capex Curve
The first wave of SMR designs has moved from licensing slides to concrete pours and signed power purchase agreements, but the NuScale UAMPS cancellation still anchors investor memory and the load is now hyperscaler, not municipal.
Advanced nuclear is no longer a slide deck category. TerraPower has broken non-nuclear ground at Kemmerer, X-energy has signed a definitive engineering contract with Dow Seadrift, Holtec is preparing the SMR-300 around the Palisades restart, Kairos has the first Hermes test reactor under construction with a Google off-take for 500 megawat...
Small modular reactors meet the hyperscaler load curve
Eighteen months after the Google Kairos and Amazon X-energy announcements, the SMR thesis has moved from PowerPoint to procurement. The binding constraints are now licensing throughput, HALEU supply, and first-of-a-kind cost discipline.
Between September 2024 and December 2024, four hyperscaler nuclear deals reset the demand curve for advanced reactors. Microsoft contracted the Three Mile Island restart with Constellation, Google signed for 500 megawatts of Kairos Power output across six to seven units, Amazon committed to X-energy and a 5 gigawatt pipeline, and Meta ope...