Nuclear startup Valar Atomics is seeking federal approval for Project Beehive, a data center campus on more than 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management property near Price, Utah, that would run on 456 small modular reactors built at the site. NPR, which first reported the filing, says the plan also includes facilities to manufacture nuclear fuel and to store radioactive waste. Combined generating capacity would reach about 9.4 GW, Data Center Dynamics reports.
For scale, the US has switched on just three new nuclear plants this century, totaling about 3.4 GW, NPR notes.
The filing
The reactors would be factory-built units of about 25 MW each, installed one at a time so the campus can grow in phases and enter operation relatively quickly, according to the proposal document NPR reviewed. Valar aims to have its first reactor live in 2028, and the full site, including the data centers, fuel plant, and waste facilities, is targeted for completion by 2032.
Valar is also pursuing roughly 650 acres of Utah state trust land near Wellington and Price, state records show. Any construction on federal land faces environmental review first.
From test reactor to gigasite
The filing arrives four months after Valar's Ward 250 test reactor achieved criticality at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County, about 30 miles from the Beehive site. The Department of Energy called it the first DOE-authorized reactor built outside a national laboratory. "Nine months ago, this was an empty site. Today, there's a critical reactor on it, built and operated by the Valar team," said Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics.
On July 1 the machine generated its first electricity, powering a single Nvidia chip in front of an audience, according to the company. Valar, founded in 2023 in El Segundo, California, is working with Nvidia on a 30 MW, nearly waterless data center design, Deseret News reported.
Ward 250 is a research reactor, not a power plant. Beehive is the commercial leap.
Local pushback
Carbon County is divided over the project. County officials have welcomed investment in communities hollowed out by coal's decline, but residents told The Salt Lake Tribune they do not want to live alongside increased pollution and experimental nuclear technology. The Tribune counts two large data centers now proposed for Utah's coal country, one nuclear-backed and one gas-fired, a buildup that has left residents "up in arms." NPR reports the Beehive filing has also alarmed activists already confronting a wave of data center proposals statewide.
Utah's gigawatt ambitions
Baxtel tracks 70 data center facilities in Utah totaling 1,019 MW across 30 providers. Meta leads with seven sites and Aligned has six; the largest facility is Aligned SLC-03 at 80 MW. A 9.4 GW Beehive would be roughly nine times the state's tracked capacity.
Beehive is not the only gigascale proposal in the state. Creekstone Energy broke ground in December on the Delta Gigasite in Millard County, a behind-the-meter campus targeting 600 MW of gas-fired baseload by the end of 2027 under a 10 GW master plan that includes SMR options through an agreement with EnergySolutions. Governor Spencer Cox's Operation Gigawatt has made recruiting such projects explicit state policy, and SMR-powered campuses are spreading as a concept: Baxtel covered an early pairing when Crusoe teamed with Aalo Atomics in July.
Why it matters
Project Beehive inverts the usual site selection logic. Instead of queuing years for utility interconnection, put the data centers where the reactors are.
That model now has a real test case. The gap between a shipping-container-scale test reactor and a 456-unit fleet is vast, and no SMR has reached commercial operation in the US, so the 2028 target should be treated as aspirational. But the filing alone moves the market: AI power demand is redrawing the map toward places like Carbon County.
