Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn’t likely until the next decade.

The two firms have announced plans to develop an AI campus located in the Port of Victoria, Texas, just down the gulf coast from Houston.

Under the deal, Blue Energy has secured a site on which it will build and operate an advanced nuclear power plant with a generating capacity of up to 1.5 gigawatts (GW), which will provide the juice for a nearby location where Crusoe will construct the AI bit barns.

The 1,600-acre (about 6.5 square kilometers) site in Victoria County was chosen for its location, existing infrastructure, and available energy resources to support a gigawatt-scale datacenter campus, the pair say, close to electric transmission lines, fiber networks, and natural gas pipelines.

Blue Energy claims that it will use a “natural gas bridge” to deliver power to the Crusoe campus by 2028, transitioning to nuclear generation by 2031. What this means in practice is that the plant and turbine hall will be burning gas to generate power in three years’ time, while the nuclear part of the site is still being built and licensed.

The company says that it will be able to reduce the build time and costs of its nuclear reactors by prefabricating them from existing parts made via fixed-price contracting at existing fab yards and shipyards, then assembling them on site. This cuts down the amount of reinforced concrete and simplifies construction that has previously plagued nuclear projects, it claims.

“This partnership with AI infrastructure leader Crusoe marks a key milestone for Blue Energy as we work to meet rising global energy demand and, for the first time in the nuclear industry’s history, build a plant with cost and schedule certainty,” Blue Energy CEO and Co-Founder Jake Jurewicz said in a supplied remark.

However, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as the saying goes.

Blue Energy is relying on light water reactor (LWR) technology combined with what it says are the latest passive safety features – the reactor building itself is submerged in a pool - to create a plant that it claims will be “walk-away safe.”

Crusoe, meanwhile, is a venture-backed startup that recently rose to prominence by building out the first datacenter Abilene, Texas, for Project Stargate, the massive years-long collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank to build a network of huge AI datacenters around the world. Crusoe styles itself as an “AI factory company” and says that its vertically integrated model spanning energy sourcing, datacenter design and construction, plus a custom cloud platform allows it to build large-scale facilities faster and more cost-effectively than before. As evidence, it points to the first phase of the Abilene datacenter going live just one year after construction began.

Victoria County has not been previously mentioned as a potential site for Stargate, and the press release about this build did not mention the group.

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“Powering the AI revolution requires us to rethink energy, and Crusoe is dedicated to building the infrastructure to make it happen,” said the firm’s veep for Energy Infrastructure and Development, Andrew Likens in a canned statement.

Rethinking energy appears to mean burning fossil fuels until you can bring enough nuclear reactor capacity online to power all that hot and hungry infrastructure, as advised by datacenter infrastructure biz Schneider Electric last year. Nuclear is emerging as the carbon-free power source of choice for the tech industry’s AI ambitions, but as The Register explained earlier this year, new capacity takes years to build and bring online.

This Port of Victoria project isn’t the only nuclear datacenter in Texas; South Korean industrial giant Hyundai is set to build a reactor to provide up to 6 GW of power for AI bit barns at a site in Amarillo. ®