PreussenElektra, the E.ON company in charge of decommissioning Germany’s nuclear power plants, is working with Nvidia to assess whether its former atomic sites could host data centers for artificial intelligence. The announcement came on Wednesday, with no details on sites, timelines or financial terms.
Germany shut down its last reactors on April 15, 2023. PreussenElektra is overseeing the dismantling of seven plants, eight by some counts, including Grohnde and Brokdorf. As the facilities are torn down, the company is looking for a long-term use for the land and infrastructure. The exploratory phase will examine technical, economic and regulatory aspects. No investment decision has been made.
The interest stems from what these sites already have. They are connected to the high-voltage grid and have much of the infrastructure a data center requires. For anyone building computing capacity, grid connection is now one of the longest steps in the process. A former nuclear site starts with an advantage that farmland does not have.
The move follows a pattern already seen in the United States. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have signed agreements with nuclear power producers, including the restart of a reactor. Google is counting on the restart of the Duane Arnold plant in Iowa as the main power source for its project in Palo. In Finland, it signed a 20-year contract with Fortum linked to the Loviisa plant. Nuclear electricity, stable and free of direct emissions, is the answer the big digital players are looking for to power AI workloads.
In the German case, the issue is site reuse, not power generation. The country phased out nuclear power as a political choice, and the debate over its return remains open. In the meantime, decommissioned sites can generate economic value and preserve local industrial expertise. Other German energy groups, such as RWE and Uniper, are also weighing the use or sale of former coal sites for the same purpose.
If the study produces a positive outcome, the first projects could emerge near already robust grid nodes, with clean energy just a few kilometers away. The next step, for those looking at nuclear, would be to pair these campuses with new atomic power generation, as is already happening in the United States.
