St. Louis – September 13, 2026 -- Island Roadhouse Data Centers has detailed design plans for an atomic-powered, low-water data center campus in Missouri offering up to 154 MW of sellable IT load in its first phase, targeting commercial operation in 2034.
Campus design generates its own power behind the meter using advanced atomic reactors
The facility is planned to run on advanced atomic reactors in an N+1 configuration for reactor-level redundancy, with heat converted to electricity via an indirect closed supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle. The campus is not designed to export power to the grid; all generation is intended to serve the on-site compute load directly.
Design responds to multi-year US interconnection delays cited by federal data
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "Queued Up: 2026 Edition" (June 2026) found roughly 8,200 projects representing 1,312 GW of generation capacity sitting in US interconnection queues at the end of 2025, with a median wait exceeding five years from request to commercial operation for projects completed that year. The International Energy Agency's "Key Questions on Energy and AI" (April 2026) projects global data center electricity consumption nearly doubling from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, noting that US developers facing slow grid connections are increasingly turning to on-site generation.
Closed-loop cooling and thermal network target low water use and waste-heat resale
High-density data halls are designed around closed-loop warm-water direct-to-chip liquid cooling with dry heat rejection as the primary sink, aiming for a low water-use-effectiveness target. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's December 2024 report estimated US data centers directly consumed about 66 billion liters of water in 2023, a figure the campus design seeks to avoid replicating.
Waste heat is planned for sale to third-party industrial and non-industrial users through a metered campus thermal network, with capacity reservation and thermal interconnection as the service model. Those users would finance, build, own and operate their own downstream facilities, while the campus is engineered to reject all required heat independently, making reuse an optimization rather than a dependency.
Company sells long-term facility capacity, not power or compute
Island Roadhouse's base business is selling long-term, power-backed, liquid-cooling-ready data center capacity and facility services; customers bring and operate their own compute, and the company does not sell electricity, cloud compute or GPU-as-a-service. "The constraint on AI infrastructure is no longer the chip. It is power, and the years it can take to get power delivered," said David Kinsman, Chief Technology Officer of Island Roadhouse Data Centers. A Phase 2 expansion is planned under the campus master plan following the initial 154 MW rollout.