Kairos Power has brought in Samsung’s engineering arm to help build the 50-megawatt demonstration reactor it owes Google, a package that combines equity with construction know-how.
Samsung C&T will hand over $70M as a stake in Kairos and add “in-kind” engineering services, putting the total value of the arrangement at up to $100M. The contractor’s resume runs to roughly a dozen nuclear projects, some built alone and some as a partner.
Construction is underway at the company’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee site, where two reactors are being built. Hermes 1, the smaller of the pair, is a demonstrator running at low power, and its purpose is to sharpen the commercial blueprint. Hermes 2, the one that matters commercially, is a fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor of a class the industry has talked about for years without putting one into service. Power from the site forms the opening 50 megawatts of the Google pact.
Data centers set the pace
The relationship dates to the fall of 2024, when Google signed its first agreement and asked for about half a gigawatt of nuclear capacity by 2035. Demand from AI data centers has turned reactor startups into a hot category. Kairos runs on TRISO fuel, in which tiny uranium seeds sit inside layers of ceramic and carbon that are packed into billiard ball-sized spheres, an arrangement designed to make a meltdown far less likely.
To keep up with the promised schedule, Kairos has to move faster on every reactor that follows Hermes 2, which is where Samsung’s building muscle comes in.
