Google has chosen Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for a 50-megawatt Hermes 2 advanced small modular reactor that it is developing with nuclear startup Kairos Power. Under a long-term agreement, the Tennessee Valley Authority will buy the plant’s entire output to supply electricity to Google data centers in Tennessee and neighboring Alabama when the reactor enters service in 2030. The deal is the first time a U.S. utility has signed a power-purchase agreement for a so-called Generation IV reactor. Google and Kairos said they will shoulder the construction risk and costs, while TVA provides the revenue stream through the purchase agreement, insulating the authority’s customers from first-of-a-kind expenses. Hermes 2 is the initial deployment under a broader 2024 pact in which Google agreed to procure up to 500 megawatts of advanced nuclear capacity from Kairos by 2035 to meet the fast-growing power needs of artificial-intelligence data centers. The project has backing from the U.S. Department of Energy, whose leadership described advanced nuclear as critical to maintaining U.S. competitiveness in AI and clean-energy technology. Kairos’s liquid-salt-cooled design operates at low pressure, allowing for smaller, factory-built modules that the partners say can be erected faster and more cheaply than conventional gigawatt-scale reactors. The initiative underscores a wider shift by technology companies toward nuclear power as they seek reliable, carbon-free energy to accommodate surging electricity demand.