Meta on Tuesday said it had struck an agreement to keep one nuclear reactor of a US utility company in Illinois operating for 20 years. Meta's deal with Constellation Energy is the social networking company's first with a nuclear power plant. Other large tech companies are looking to secure electricity as US power demand rises significantly in part due to the needs of artificial intelligence and datacenters. Google has reached agreements to supply its datacenters with nuclear power via a half-dozen small reactors built by a California utility company. Microsoft's similar contract will restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the most serious nuclear accident and radiation leak in US history.

The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania will invest 1.6 billion to revive it, agreeing to sell all the output to Microsoft as the tech titan seeks carbon-free electricity for data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom. Constellation Energy, the biggest U.S. operator of reactors, expects Three Mile Island to go back into service in 2028, according to a statement Friday. While one of the site's two units permanently closed almost a half-century ago after the worst U.S. nuclear accident, Constellation is planning to reopen the other reactor, which shut in 2019 because it couldn't compete economically. Shares of Constellation Energy jumped as much as 22%, the most on record, to an all-time high on Friday.