- Climate goals, data centers driving interest in atomic sector
- Amazon, Google, Microsoft have recently done power deals

Some of the world’s biggest managers of private capital are making moves to finance and invest in nuclear power plants, latching onto a revival in the sector driven in part by tech giants’ electricity-intensive AI ambitions.
Carlyle Group Inc. has been approached about backing credit investments linked to nuclear, a person with knowledge of the matter said, and Brookfield Asset Management is looking at boosting its exposure to the industry. Apollo Global Management Inc. is in talks to provide financing for a plant under construction at Hinkley Point in the UK, Bloomberg News has reported.
Financing reactors allows alternative asset managers to invest large amounts of cash into assets with steady returns and growing demand. Climate goals, the electrification of economies and the rapidly rising need for massive computing power are converging to drive interest in the stable, low-carbon source of power.
Big Tech’s Demand for Power Is Set to Grow in the Coming Years
The revival of interest follows decades of stagnation in the US and Europe as utilities and governments mostly stopped investing and let their facilities age. Some reactors shut down because profits were squeezed by cheap natural gas from the shale boom, and power prices were hit in areas even further by wind and solar. For any projects that did go ahead, private money was often put off by construction delays and cost overruns.
The tech sector’s huge energy needs have led to a number of recent deals. Last month, Microsoft Corp. announced a power agreement that will reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, while Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are both investing in the developing area of small modular reactors.
“We’re seeing more and more private equity take interest,” said Andy Champ, who leads the UK arm of a partnership between GE Vernova and Hitachi Ltd. for modular reactors. “You see growing power demand from Google, Meta, Amazon and they want stable supply. You’re not going to get that from wind and solar alone.”
Nuclear can also offer the kind of regulated, guaranteed returns that attract investors, according to Champ. In the UK, nuclear plants benefit from government-guaranteed prices or remuneration, which could be extended to SMRs, helping to bring down costs and speed deployment.
But despite the heightened interest from investors, challenges remain. Safety concerns continue to weigh on public support for new projects, and the atomic sector has a long history of exceeding budgets and delays. Southern Co.’s Vogtle, the first new US reactor in more than three decades, was completed earlier in 2024 seven years behind schedule and more than $20 billion over budget.
Power Needs
Tech firms’ demand for power is also stoking concerns about the impact on other businesses as well as households.
Amazon’s purchase of a $650 million data center campus adjacent to a Pennsylvania nuclear plant recently drew ire because it’s locking up significant power supply from the facility under a long-term deal.
US federal regulators will hold a conference this week where they’ll discuss the risks of supply shortages from putting data centers next to generators and the infrastructure costs. So-called tech hyperscalers may face opposition if the energy investment needed to support their expansion pushes too much cost onto other consumers.
The energy needed for data centers used by hyperscalers is huge — the equivalent of three New York City’s being added to the US power grid by 2020, according to a note last week by Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo.
As new projects take time to come online, existing plants could be expanded to fill power gaps in the interim, according to Robert Bittencourt, a partner at the firm.
“To the extent a market does develop for greenfield nuclear projects in the US, the cash flow profiles, the long duration nature of these assets, the size of the investment opportunity fits in very nicely with the pools of capital that we manage, primarily within our retirement services business,” he said on the Odd Lots podcast this month.
Ben Higson, a partner in the M&A and capital markets team at law firm Vinson & Elkins, also sees reasons for private money to be attracted to nuclear, citing an “excess of dry powder” and clear investment profiles, even if returns are lower than in usual projects.
“We expect this longer-term view to be more readily adopted by private equity and other funds over the coming years,” he said.
Still, the decade-plus wait to get to energy production for new nuclear plants is too long for Blackstone Inc. to be bullish on the industry, one executive at the firm said, declining to be identified as he was discussing internal thinking. The New York-based asset manager does see other opportunities in the space, including existing assets and service providers.
Money managers appear to be more positive. The Range Nuclear Renaissance Index, designed to track the performance of companies involved in the advanced reactor, utilities, construction and fuel industries, has almost doubled in the past year.
Nuclear Startups
Private capital already has exposure in nuclear, with investments in early-stage companies that are developing new technology. Ares Management Corp. is a backer of X-energy, which is part of Amazon’s recent deal. Venture capital firm Terra Talent has money in Kairos Power.
Brookfield’s infrastructure group is looking for ways to invest in nuclear as commercial acceptance of these types of projects increases, David Krant, chief financial officer of the group, said at the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference this month.
The industry’s ”biggest hurdle” right now is financing and sharing risk, and hyperscalers are involved in developing new frameworks to access power, he said.
Tech companies’ deals for nuclear power have accelerated and interest among investors is growing, according to George Borovas, head of the nuclear practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth.
“Private equity investors are going to look at this and see an investment opportunity,” he said. “It might be exciting for them because for years it’s been overlooked.”
— With assistance from Shery Ahn and Haidi Lun
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