The White House is looking to help revive decommissioned nuclear power plants in an effort to meet growing energy demand.

AI data center growth has put increasing pressure on the grid, amid a wider effort to build out clean energy and retire fossil fuel plants.

In September, Microsoft announced that it would purchase all the power coming out of Constellation Energy's Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, which would need to be restarted for $1.6 billion to produce the 837MW. Constellation is seeking a DOE loan to cover the costs.

Earlier this year, the Biden Administration announced that it would provide a $1.5bn loan to help restart an 800MW nuclear power plant in southwestern Michigan, despite problems with the plant’s steam generator tubes.

Speaking this week at the Reuters Sustainability conference, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said that the White House is looking into restarting more nuclear plants.

"We're working on it in a very concrete way," he said. "There are two that I can think of," he added, without disclosing the sites.

Zaidi also said that small modular reactors (SMRs) were another technology that the White House was supporting. "SMR is a technology that is not a decades-away play. It's one that companies in the United States are looking to deploy in this decade."

The US needs three times its current nuclear energy capacity to meet AI's growing power needs, the DOE said in a report this month. The DOE recently said there are 190 coal and ex-nuclear sites that could be powered up for new nuclear capacity, potentially offering up to 269GW.

Back in March, AWS acquired the 960MW Cumulus data center campus in Pennsylvania, which draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW nuclear power station in Luzerne County.

Google and Oracle have also recently discussed their desire to use nuclear energy to power their data centers