Island Roadhouse Data Centers unveiled its design for an atomic powered data center campus in Missouri built to generate its own electricity behind the meter. The campus is not planned to export power to the grid.
That matters because getting new power delivered has become the real bottleneck in AI infrastructure. Per Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's June 2026 "Queued Up" report, 8,200 projects totaling 1,312 GW are sitting in U.S. interconnection queues, with a median wait past five years for projects completed in 2025.
Island Roadhouse's answer is advanced reactors in an N+1 setup, converting heat to power through a supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle. No batteries in the plan either. Storage is thermal only.
Cooling runs on closed loop warm water liquid cooling with dry heat rejection, a real consideration given data centers are thirsty. LBNL pegged U.S. data center water use at 66 billion liters in 2023 alone.
Turning Waste Into Inventory:
Waste heat gets sold, not dumped, through a metered thermal network to outside industrial users
CTO David Kinsman put it plainly: "Every data center produces heat, and most of them pay to throw it away"
Reactor Math: Phase 1 targets up to 154 MW of sellable IT load, aiming for commercial operation in 2034. A Phase 2 expansion is already on the master plan.
Interconnection queues aren't clearing up anytime soon. If Island Roadhouse can actually pull this off, expect more developers to start asking why they're waiting in line at all.
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