Swedish small modular reactor (SMR) start-up Blykalla has closed a $50 million (€42m) financing round to accelerate development of its lead-cooled SMR, with a focus on meeting growing demand from the data center sector.

The funding was co-led by US SMR developer Oklo, Sweden’s Norrsken Launcher, and Armada Investment AG. Oklo has signed several deals (mostly non-binding) with data center operators to supply them with power from its under-development SMR. The company has entered agreements with Equinix, Switch, and Prometheus Hyperscale.

Blykalla said that it will use the capital to scale testing and validation work at an advanced reactor test site near the Oskarshamn nuclear power station, progress design and engineering of the first reactor units, and advance commercial and regulatory efforts to secure a deployment site and necessary licensing.

The company is developing the Sealer-55, a modular 55MW design intended for both grid-connected power and industrial heat applications.

The latest funding round follows efforts to explore deployments in Sweden to power digital infrastructure.

In October, Blykalla joined Swedish cloud developer evroc and nuclear services provider Studsvik in signing a MoU to assess the potential for Sweden’s first nuclear-powered data centre at Studsvik’s licensed nuclear site in Nyköping.

The partnership aims to evaluate the technical and commercial viability of co-locating hyperscale data center capacity with an SMR on the site, including engagement with municipalities and defining possible commercial power purchase arrangements. A joint steering committee is now set to examine the site and business model.

Over the past year, several data center operators have committed to offtake future power from the SMR sector within the European market. Notably, in August, global colo firm Equinix partnered with ULC-Energy in the Netherlands and Stellaria in France to offtake power from planned SMR developments in the countries.

Before this, in March, European data center firm Data4 signed an MoU with Westinghouse to explore the use of Westinghouse Electric Company’s AP300 SMR to power future data centers in Europe.

DCD did a deep dive into the SMR sector and its potential to power data centers in our latest magazine. Available for free here.