As capital markets grow excited about the demand for nuclear power boosted by artificial intelligence, star startups riding this wave of the times are rushing to launch a new round of capital operations.
TerraPower, founded by former world’s richest man Bill Gates, announced on June 18 local time that it has completed a new round of financing worth $650 million. The company revealed that in addition to continued investments from existing shareholders such as founder Gates and South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, NVentures, the venture capital arm of chip giant NVIDIA, has also become a new shareholder of the company.
With this financing, TerraPower has raised more than $2 billion in private funding and has also received a $2 billion grant from the U.S. government to fund the design and construction of America’s first commercially operated advanced nuclear power plant in Wyoming.
As a hallmark of technological innovation, TerraPower’s reactor uses liquid sodium instead of water for cooling, hence it is also called a “sodium-cooled fast reactor”. This technology was jointly developed by the company and GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
It is reported that the company’s first nuclear power plant will use a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor equipped with a molten salt energy storage system, which can boost the system’s output to 500 megawatts when needed, equivalent to the energy required to power 400,000 households. TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque disclosed that construction of the non-nuclear facilities of this nuclear power plant has been underway for more than a year. The company will complete the design of the nuclear power plant this year and expects to obtain regulatory approval for the nuclear reactor next year.
