France has decided that the future of artificial intelligence won’t just be powered by GPUs and grid upgrades; it will be fuelled by fast neutrons. In a move that places the country at the frontier of next-generation energy systems, French startup Stellaria has secured the first commercial reservation for its advanced reactor, Stellarium, and will work with Equinix to deliver 500 MW of clean nuclear power for AI infrastructure.
If the plan succeeds, this would be the first time a nuclear reactor is explicitly designed and deployed to run commercial-scale AI workloads.
A Different Kind of Reactor for a Different Era
Stellaria’s design doesn’t belong to the conventional family of reactors that power grids today. Stellarium is a fast-neutron molten-salt reactor using liquid chloride fuel, a configuration engineered not only to generate energy but also to destroy nuclear waste.