Happy Friday. This is Data Center Digest, and we’re looking at the biggest deals, new tech, and the evolving world of data centers.

Here’s what’s on deck today:

• Argonne is helping drive a private sector revolution in tiny nuclear tech

• Big Deals: EdgeCore has a HUGE infusion for its Mesa campus, OpenAI DCs will focus on hardware, and CoreWeave ups its value to $7bn

• Check this out: Top 250 data center companies, and a micro addendum

Est. read time: 4mins 40secs

Argonne, micro-reactors, and the future of American nuclear

The appetite for 30-year, $30 billion nuclear projects is gone in America. And with the latest failure of the once-promising NuScale SMR project, the future of nuclear power in America doesn’t feel hopeful.
However, Argonne National Lab, a DOE-funded research laboratory outside of Chicago, and its work on micro-reactors is a bright bastion of promise amidst the decades of nuclear disappointment.

Argonne

Argonne’s research activities are broad. They study everything from energy storage and renewables to supercomputing, and fundamental physics. The lab's scientists and engineers are at the forefront of developing new energy solutions, advancing nuclear science and technology, and exploring new materials.

The Argonne lab, a holdover from the Manhattan Project of WWII, has played a large part in creating the civilian nuclear power industry.

Yet seemingly suddenly, with material science technology booming and nuclear energy projects faltering, Argonne’s expertise in alternative nuclear technologies is in even higher demand.

“A lot of these reactor start-ups are seizing the opportunity of this foregone innovation over the last six decades,” said Roger Blomquist, a principal nuclear engineer at Argonne talking about its micro-reactor research. “This is the wave of the future.”

Here are three (of dozens) private nuclear startups using Argonne-developed research and technology to try to transform how the US does nuclear.

TerraPower

TerraPower is a Bill Gates-backed nuclear power start-up focused on research and development of state-of-the-art nuclear technologies. TP partners with Argonne to advance the development of TerraPower’s sodium fast reactor and molten salt energy storage technology, Natrium.

The collaboration with TerraPower focuses on supporting the Natrium project in methods development for reactor design and licensing, fuel qualification by providing data, experiments for high-temperature sodium environments, and fuel handling system component testing at Argonne’s METL facility.

Innovative designs, such as Natrium’s reactor-plus-storage design, can provide clean, firm, and cost-competitive power to grids that are using increasing amounts of renewables.

Oklo

Oklo Inc., a California-based nuclear company, specializes in the development of small, fast reactors, notably their Aurora product line. 

Their collaboration with Argonne focuses on enhancing nuclear technology, particularly in areas like code validation and verification for reactor safety and efficiency.
Leveraging Argonne's specialized facilities, Oklo has acquired experimental data crucial for validating reactor thermal-hydraulic and safety analysis codes used in their licensing applications to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

This partnership also extends to research on used nuclear fuel recycling, aiming to create a sustainable fuel source while reducing hazardous waste. Oklo's work with Argonne represents a significant step in advancing smaller-scale, sustainable nuclear power solutions.

X-Energy

X-energy is at the forefront of developing smaller, high-efficiency nuclear reactors with low-waste output, as well as next-generation fuel to power these reactors.

The nuclear startup based in Maryland is leveraging Argonne's expertise in computational fluid dynamics simulations to advance its Xe-100 reactor design.
This partnership enhances the reactor’s fuel burnup rate, thermal efficiency, and waste output modeling, contributing to increased safety and reduced development time.

The Xe-100 aims to provide reliable, carbon-free, on-demand electricity to the power grid, potentially at multiple scales, including local deployments.

X-energy's TRISO (TRi-structural ISOtropic) fuel is a unique and advanced nuclear fuel design known for its enhanced safety features.
Each TRISO fuel particle consists of a uranium fuel kernel surrounded by layers of carbon and ceramic materials, providing high resistance to damage and preventing the release of radioactive material even under extreme conditions.

- Big Deals -

EdgeCore raises $1.9B for Mesa data center expansion

EdgeCore's LEED-designed, water-neutral campus in Mesa will support a minimum of 450 MW of critical load.

The massive campus, which currently has one operational data center and two additional data centers under construction totaling 206 MW, will feature 3.1+ million square feet of data center space and will be built by construction giant Holder.

The financing is being done through a Green loan with their parent company, the creatively named "Partner's Group."
And Edgecore is going in right now, they've got projects going in Santa Clara, Virginia, Mesa, and another massive one in Reno.

Holder has built data centers across the country for the likes of Verizon, Digital Realty, NTT, CloudHQ, and others.

 Read more here

Open AI has plans for new data centers

OpenAI has appointed Richard Ho, a former Google executive, as the head of its hardware division, signaling a strategic focus on hardware optimization for its data center design.

Ho's extensive experience includes leading Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPU) project and co-inventing methods for using machine learning in chip architecture design.

OpenAI's recruitment for a deep learning hardware/software co-design engineer further underscores its commitment to building a multidisciplinary team, tasked with optimizing partners' hardware, identifying new deep learning accelerators, and bringing them into production.
These efforts are part of OpenAI's larger strategy to influence and innovate in the field of AI hardware, parallel to its ongoing collaboration with Microsoft's Azure cloud​​.

Read more here

CoreWeave raises $640M for AI

CoreWeave, an AI cloud infrastructure company, recently sold a minority stake in its business for $642 million.

In August, CoreWeave secured a substantial $2.3 billion debt financing facility in a round led by Magnetar Capital, managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, with strategic participation from Coatue, DigitalBridge Credit, and funds managed by BlackRock, PIMCO, and Carlyle.

Founded in 2017, CoreWeave initially focused on crypto-mining but has since pivoted to general-purpose computing and generative AI hosting.

The company offers a specialized cloud service with access to a variety of Nvidia GPUs, supporting diverse applications from machine learning to real-time streaming. CoreWeave Co-Founder and CEO Michael Intrator highlights the company's role in advancing the AI industry, emphasizing its commitment to providing top-tier AI infrastructure integrated with advanced GPU, networking, and storage technologies.

Read more here

What’s more

That’s it. Thanks for reading.

Let me know what you think by replying to this email. Also, sharing it with someone who loves data centers would be great too.

- Taylor