Firm Power For AI: Overview
AI data centers need power that is present every hour of every day; the Kronos burner is designed as a firm, co-located source, with honest limits stated up front.
What data centers actually need
Training and serving large models is not a peaky, weekday-daytime load. A training run holds tens of thousands of accelerators at high utilization for weeks, and an inference fleet answers requests around the clock. The electrical demand is firm: high, flat, and continuous. That is a different problem from powering a city that sleeps at night, and it is a poor match for sources that come and go with weather.
The Kronos burner (Aegis / MetroVolt) is a D-³He tandem-mirror generator. MetroVolt is the housing sited beside data centers and cities so the power is generated next to the load rather than at the far end of a congested transmission line. Because co-location shortens the electrical path and direct energy conversion removes the steam cycle, the plant can be compact and use very little water.
Honesty first: MetroVolt is a design and simulation study. No unit has been built. A test burner is targeted near 2032 and a commercial fleet near 2036, after the breeder (Hyperion) is built starting Q2 2027. Just as important, the burner as specified does not yet meet hyperscale reliability. Its modelled availability sits between 0.86 and 0.995, against a Tier III target of 0.99982 — 30 to 100 times more downtime. That is why every serious data-center design here is a hybrid, not a lone reactor.
- Firm, flat, 24/7 demand from training and inference
- Value from siting next to the load, not from any economic claim
- Availability gate is real and load-bearing — redundancy is mandatory
- Timeline: test ~2032, commercial ~2036; nothing operating today