Island Roadhouse Data Centers has revealed its design approach for an integrated, low-water, nuclear-powered data centre campus planned in Missouri, USA. The campus is designed to generate on-site power for its compute load, cool AI data halls and to make waste heat available to third-party users.
The planning basis is advanced atomic reactors in an N+1 configuration for reactor-level redundancy. Heat from the reactors is planned to be converted to electricity through an indirect closed supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle. The campus is not planned as a power exporter, and no export to the grid is planned.
The high-density data halls are designed around closed-loop warm-water direct-to-chip liquid cooling, with dry heat rejection as the primary and ultimate campus heat sink. The campus is a low-water design with an annual water-use-effectiveness planning target. Thermal energy storage is planned although the campus has no grid-scale battery, and its only planned energy store is thermal.
Waste heat is planned to be made available to third-party industrial process and other non-industrial users through a campus thermal network, with thermal capacity reservation, metered thermal energy and thermal interconnection as the planned service model. Those users would finance, build, own and operate their own facilities. The campus is designed to reject all of its required heat on its own, so heat reuse is an optimization and a sustainability benefit rather than a dependency.
The company says the design is a response to the power and water constraints now shaping AI infrastructure.
“Power and cooling are not two problems. They are one system,” said David Kinsman, Chief Technology Officer of Island Roadhouse Data Centers. “We are engineering the reactors, the power conversion, the liquid cooling and the heat network as a single campus. The constraint on AI infrastructure is no longer the chip. It is power, and the years it can take to get power delivered. We designed this campus so that the power is generated where the compute sits, behind the meter.”
He added: “Every data center produces heat, and most of them pay to throw it away. Our thermal design treats heat as a product. The campus is designed to sell data centre waste heat through a metered thermal network so users can take the heat we would otherwise reject. This is what the next generation of sustainable data centres will look like.”
Island Roadhouse sells long-term, power-backed, liquid-cooling-ready data centre capacity and facility services. Customers bring and operate their own computers and Island Roadhouse does not sell electricity, cloud computing or GPU-as-a-service as its base business. Phase 1 is planned to offer up to 154 MW of sellable IT load and is targeting commercial operation in 2034. A Phase 2 expansion is planned under the campus master plan.
