- Crusoe and Aalo will test SMR technology for six months using Crusoe’s modular Spark AI data center
- The trial will probe the nuclear capacity factor, load following and energy storage for power-hungry AI workloads
- Crusoe and Aalo are targeting nuclear-powered commercial AI data center deployments by 2029
Crusoe and Aalo are kicking the tires on nuclear-powered AI infrastructure, pairing Aalo’s small modular reactor (SMR) tech with Crusoe’s modular Spark data center for a six-month trial run.
Aalo co-founder and CEO Matt Loszak told Fierce the aim first and foremost is to test what he called the “capacity factor.”
“That is, are we able to operate for a solid number of months with very limited downtime? That’ll be one big aspect. Another is what does it look like when you deal with some of the load following for data centers,” he said. “What they might try to do is simulate different types of loads that Crusoe often faces, whether it’s for inference or training or what have you where the different types of fluctuations can vary.”
Loszak said the setup will also include a “form of energy storage” like batteries to test load following with the combination of nuclear and battery tech.
While all of this might sound simple, Loszak said it’ll actually be relatively complicated because “it’ll be the first time that these two types of infrastructure are so closely coupled.”
“A lot of this is going to come down to electrical engineering and integration. It’s not always the really sexy stuff, but controls, monitoring, experimenting with various load profiles and fault conditions in both directions,” Cully Cavness, Crusoe co-founder, president and Chief Strategy Officer, told Fierce. “I think getting that comfort and confidence that the two work well together before we start to scale it up commercially” is the primary focus of the trial, he said.
Why are Crusoe and Aalo partnering?
Cavness said the goal is to prove out the technology so Crusoe and Aalo can press ahead with commercial deployments in 2029.
Like every other major cloud player, Crusoe is on the hunt for new ways to fuel its data center deployments in an increasingly power-constrained world. Cavness said the company takes a portfolio approach to energy, pursuing natural gas, solar and battery technologies. It’s now eyeing nuclear, which Cavness said has been pitched as a promising solution that addresses environmental concerns and can be sited almost anywhere.
Indeed, all three of the major hyperscalers have inked nuclear power supply deals. However, most of these center around securing power supply from large legacy nuclear plants. What Crusoe and Aalo are trying to do is prove out the economics of a modular form factor and demonstrate how SMR tech handles the variable loads of an AI data center.
“The problem has always been time and money. It’s been very, very long, like decade-plus timelines to build these plants,” Cavness said. And because time equals money, timeline overruns mean costs can easily spiral out of control, such that the “price per megawatt or price per kilowatt hour has not been as attractive in some of these builds,” he said.
“One of the great solutions to that is modularizing and building a product that really can be mass manufactured to drive to economies of scale, bring the timeline down and ultimately bring the cost down,” he continued.
What does Aalo do?
That’s where Aalo comes in. The company is focused on building exactly what Cavness described – a modular, manufactured reactor pod that can be flexibly deployed and stacked to power data centers of different sizes. The approach matches up nicely with Crusoe’s own modular take on data center construction.
And having gone from founding to criticality (that is, a sustained nuclear reaction) in three years, Aalo is moving at what could be considered lightspeed for the nuclear industry.
The first product it has is the Aalo One Reactor in its 50 MW Aalo Pod configuration. While this might sound small in a world where gigawatt-scale data centers are increasingly prevalent, Loszak said there’s a good reason it’s targeting this range.
Large legacy plants take too long to build, he said. And “when you go too small with nuclear, the economics suffer – so if you make a 1 megawatt reactor. So, what we’re trying to do is home in on the ideal balance of economy of number and economy of scale,” he explained. “It just so happens that a lot of data centers are getting powered by 10 to 50 megawatt gas turbines, small modular gas generators. So that’s why we chose that stack bracket and we think we can get the economics to be very competitive with natural gas.”
Of course, there are likely to be hurdles along the way. Before commercial deployments can begin domestically, Aalo must secure approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company and its data center partners will also likely need to win over local communities which are increasingly skeptical of data center facilities coming to town – even without nuclear tech in the equation.
Loszak and Cavness said the answer to the latter issue is choosing build sites carefully and educating the surrounding communities.
Read more about Crusoe and Aalo here:
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