A "tipping point" on new nuclear power construction is near, according to UBS.
Analysts at the Swiss bank had grown more optimistic about the nuclear sub-sector following multiple nuclear contracts earlier in the year that had focused on optimizing existing assets and repowering retired assets, including Microsoft's deal to purchase power from the Three Mile Island facility that was scheduled to be decommissioned.
This week, UBS said the tipping point had started to tip further.
First, Google went nuclear with a deal to buy power from startup Kairos Power to use smaller nuclear reactors to run its energy-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) data centres.
The first Kairos small modular reactor (SMR) is expected to come online by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035.
This "could potentially become a blueprint for similar deals with other hyperscalers and spawn a phase of next gen nuclear construction", UBS said.
Analysts at the bank said the Google deal appears to be the first corporate power purchase agreement for new nuclear.
UBS said the expected ability of some 'gen4' SMR designs to be refueled without shutting down their reactors "offers a solution that would be a benefit to data centers vs traditional reactor designs that require refueling outages".
Then, yesterday, Amazon inked three SMR nuclear deals, including contributing to a $500 million funding round in X-Energy Reactor Co.
To help decarbonise its own data centres and servers, including for its Amazon Web Services arm, Amazon and X-Energy agreed to collaborate to bring on more than 5GW of new US power projects by 2039.
The pair said this would be the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs to date.