Nuclear power for AI data centres: why financing lags deals

The nuclear headlines keep coming. Meta has now stacked up agreements with Constellation, Vistra and Entergy worth more than 6.6GW of capacity by 2035. Google has ordered small modular reactors from Kairos Power. Microsoft is bringing Three Mile Island back online. Capacity has tracked most of these moves as they landed, from the SMR explainer that first flagged data centre operators as early adopters to the running power deal tracker built with Datacloud Global Congress.

What hasn’t had the same airtime is what happens after the press release. Signing a power purchase agreement is one thing. Getting a reactor, or a restart, or an SMR fleet, actually financed, built and insured on schedule is another. That gap between announcement and delivery is where Metro Connect Fall x Datacloud USA is pointing its new Investment and Finance Summit and Nuclear for AI Forum this September, and it’s arguably the least covered part of the story so far.

The deals are done, the money isn’t

Capacity’s own reporting has already tracked how quickly this market is tightening. Saudi Arabia’s newly confirmed civil nuclear programme has joined the same queue as Meta, Microsoft and Google for licensed engineers, forged reactor components and enriched fuel, none of which scale quickly. That’s a supply chain problem. But underneath it sits a financing problem that gets far less attention: nuclear plants are capital-intensive, slow to build, and historically financed on utility balance sheets in regulated markets that no longer exist in the same form.

A recent analysis in Utility Dive laid out why the industry has all but stalled in the US despite more than 400 operating reactors globally: not a single large-scale plant is currently under construction there. The barrier isn’t safety or capability, the piece argued, it’s structure.

The proposed fix looks like conventional project finance, layering infrastructure fund and pension equity through construction, long-tenor bank and insurer debt often backed by Department of Energy guarantees, and hyperscaler offtakers underwriting the revenue case. That’s a fundamentally different capital stack to the one utilities have used for decades, and it’s still being built in real time.

David Williams, vice president of nuclear business development at Kiewit Nuclear Solutions, put the near-term reality plainly at a Duane Morris webinar earlier this year: “Natural gas is still kind of the king right now.” Nuclear’s economics improve, he argued, as programmes move from one-off builds to repeatable ones and a supply chain forms around them. Until that happens, financiers are pricing a technology that hasn’t yet proven it can be delivered on budget at scale, which is precisely the risk premium project finance exists to solve.

Where the real gap exists

If financing is one gap, insurance is the other, and it’s arguably tighter. Builders’ risk cover, the policy protecting a plant during construction, is in short supply relative to the pipeline. Industry discussion at a recent FT Global Insurance Summit put the proportion of planned data centre projects actually in construction at just 2 to 3%, with builders’ risk capacity the specific bottleneck, even as that capacity has grown by half over nine months in response to demand.

Nuclear adds a further layer most underwriters haven’t priced before. Jon Tellekamp, chief underwriting officer for construction and energy at Axa XL, told Business Insurance the sector is only just working out how to approach it: “It’s going to be something that is going to test the market a little bit.” Long lead times on transformers and switchgear, delay-in-startup exposure running into millions per day, and third-party liability structures borrowed from a handful of historic nuclear builds all sit outside standard data centre insurance programmes.

None of this is abstract for the executives heading to Austin. It’s the exact intersection Metro Connect Fall’s agenda is now built around: legal and M&A advisers, insurers including Aon and Lockton among this year’s sponsors, construction firms, and investors all sitting in the same room as fibre and hyperscale buyers for the first time under one roof with Datacloud USA.

What it means for deals ahead of Austin

For operators, the practical takeaway is that site selection and power strategy now need to be underwritten alongside financing and insurance from day one, not bolted on once a nuclear offtake is signed. Capacity’s coverage of the Nuclear Summit at Datacloud Global Congress 2026 flagged the same pattern from a different angle: community acceptance, not technology, is emerging as the binding constraint on how fast nuclear-backed capacity can actually be delivered. Financing and insurance are the commercial equivalent, a second constraint sitting quietly behind every headline offtake deal.

For investors and insurers, it means a genuine first-mover opportunity. Whoever builds a repeatable underwriting and financing model for SMR-backed data centre capacity, rather than pricing each project from scratch, stands to control the pace at which the rest of the market can move. That’s a more interesting story than another gigawatt announcement, and it’s one with far fewer bylines against it so far.

Expect the Investment and Finance Summit and Nuclear for AI Forum tracks at Metro Connect Fall to surface exactly this: which banks, insurers and infrastructure funds are actually underwriting these projects, what pricing looks like once the first repeatable deals close, and whether the capital stack can move fast enough to keep pace with AI’s power demand.