US Island Roadhouse Discloses Design for Nuclear-Powered AI Data Center Campus in Missouri

On September 9, 2026, Island Roadhouse Data Centers disclosed the design for an integrated, low-water-use, nuclear-powered data center campus it plans to build in Missouri. The campus is planned to operate behind the meter, generating power on-site to meet the electricity demand of artificial intelligence computing loads, and to cool high-density data halls through a closed-loop warm-water liquid cooling and dry heat rejection system, while supplying waste heat to third-party industrial users through a campus thermal network.

The design primarily targets the power supply and grid interconnection timeline constraints in AI infrastructure construction. According to the "Queued Up: 2026 Edition" report released by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in June 2026, as of the end of 2025, approximately 8,200 projects in the United States were waiting for grid interconnection, with a total installed capacity of 1,312 gigawatts; the median time from interconnection application to commercial operation for projects completed in 2025 exceeded 5 years. A related "Energy and AI" report released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in April 2026 projected that global data center electricity consumption will increase from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours in 2030, nearly doubling. The report also noted that, affected by the speed of grid access, US data center developers are increasingly considering on-site power generation options.

Water consumption is also one of the constraints facing data center construction. LBNL's "2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report," released in December 2024, estimated that US data centers directly consumed approximately 66 billion liters of water in 2023.

According to Island Roadhouse's plan, the campus is intended to meet the electricity demand of computing loads and core campus systems through on-site power generation, with the power source based on advanced nuclear reactors in an N+1 configuration to achieve reactor-level redundancy. The heat generated by the reactors is planned to be converted into electricity through an indirect closed supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle. The campus is not planned to serve as an external power supply base, nor will it deliver electricity to the grid.

Island Roadhouse Chief Technology Officer David Kinsman said that power and cooling are not two isolated problems, but part of the same system. The company plans to integrate reactors, power conversion, liquid cooling, and the thermal network within the same campus, so that electricity is generated where the computing equipment is located, that is, behind the meter. He also said that data centers generally generate large amounts of heat, and the campus design treats waste heat as a metered, saleable thermal energy product supplied to users through the thermal network.

In terms of cooling, the campus uses closed-loop warm-water chip-level liquid cooling for high-density computing loads, with dry heat rejection as the primary and final heat rejection method. The campus is designed according to low-water-use targets and includes a planned annual water usage effectiveness metric. Thermal energy storage is included as an optimization asset; the campus does not plan grid-scale batteries, and the only planned form of energy storage is thermal energy storage.

Campus waste heat is planned to be supplied to third-party industrial processes and other non-industrial users through the thermal network, with service models including thermal capacity reservation, metered thermal energy supply, and thermal interconnection. The relevant users will finance, build, own, and operate their own facilities. Island Roadhouse stated that the campus is designed with the capability to dissipate all the heat it needs to on its own, so thermal energy reuse is an optimization and sustainability benefit, not a dependency for campus operations.

Island Roadhouse's business positioning is to provide long-term, power-assured data center capacity and related facility services. Customers provide and operate their own computing resources; the company's core business does not include electricity sales, cloud computing, or GPU-as-a-service. Phase one of the project is planned to provide up to 154 megawatts of sellable IT load, with a target of entering commercial operation in 2034. Phase two expansion has been included in the campus master plan.