Valar Atomics and NVIDIA announced a partnership on July 1 at Valar's site in Orangeville, Utah to jointly explore a 30-megawatt data center powered by Valar's Ward250 small modular reactor and cooled with NVIDIA's water-efficient DSX design — a footprint the companies say will use almost no local water, a first for direct nuclear-powered AI compute.
From criticality to demo in 13 days
The announcement lands 13 days after Ward250 went critical on June 18 under the US Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. The TRISO-fueled microreactor is now generating 100 kilowatts of electricity — the first time a startup-built reactor has produced nuclear power — and was hooked up on stage to power an NVIDIA Blackwell chip during Wednesday's event. Founder Isaiah Taylor, who started the company at 24, told employees, investors and Utah state officials that Valar had "stopped waiting for someone else to unleash the power of the atom."
DSX cooling meets Ward250 helium loop
NVIDIA's newly unveiled DSX AI factory design uses direct liquid cooling with fluid held at 113°F, eliminating the water chillers that dominate most hyperscale sites. Paired with Ward250's helium coolant and closed-loop dry cooling, Valar and NVIDIA argue the pilot 30 MW campus will operate at near-zero incremental water draw. That is roughly 300 times smaller than the approved Stratos project in Box Elder County — but the water footprint claim is what the partnership is really selling to Utah regulators and to grid operators lining up AI capacity.
NRC still stands between the pilot and commercial power
Before Valar can sell electrons commercially, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must license Ward250 — a process NRC chairman Ho Nieh has said the commission wants to shorten to under 18 months. Valar's TRISO fuel design is engineered to run 165 years without refueling, and NVIDIA's Levi Patterson, its director for energy, science and AI infrastructure policy, joined Taylor on stage to signal that NVIDIA sees direct-nuclear compute as complementary to its fluid-intelligence and waterless cooling bets elsewhere.
Reporting based on coverage from Deseret News, Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware and NucNet.