Island Roadhouse Data Centers Details Behind-the-Meter Atomic Design for a Low-Water AI Data Center Campus in Missouri

Campus is designed to generate its own power on site, to cool high-density compute with warm-water liquid cooling and dry heat rejection, and to supply its waste heat to industrial users; up to 154 MW of sellable IT load planned in Phase 1, targeting commercial operation in 2034

ST. LOUIS, Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Island Roadhouse Data Centers today detailed its design approach for an integrated, low-water, atomic-powered data center campus planned in Missouri. The campus is designed to operate behind the meter, generating on site the power its compute load requires; to cool high-density AI data halls with closed-loop warm-water liquid cooling and dry heat rejection; and to make its waste heat available to third-party industrial users through a campus thermal network.

The design responds to the constraint now shaping AI infrastructure: power, and the time it takes to get it. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "Queued Up: 2026 Edition" (June 2026) reports that at the end of 2025 about 8,200 projects representing 1,312 GW of generation were waiting in United States interconnection queues, and that the median time from interconnection request to commercial operation exceeded five years for projects completed in 2025. The International Energy Agency's "Key Questions on Energy and AI" (April 2026) projects global data center electricity consumption roughly doubling from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, and notes that data center developers in the United States, constrained by slow grid connections, are turning to on-site generation. Water is a further constraint: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report" (December 2024) estimates that United States data centers directly consumed about 66 billion liters of water in 2023.

Generation behind the meter. The Island Roadhouse campus is designed so that on-site generation carries the compute load and the atomic-served campus core, behind the meter. The planning basis is advanced atomic reactors in an N+1 configuration for reactor-level redundancy. Heat from the reactors is planned to be converted to electricity through an indirect closed supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle. The campus is not planned as a power exporter, and no export to the grid is planned.

"Power and cooling are not two problems. They are one system," said David Kinsman, Chief Technology Officer of Island Roadhouse Data Centers. "We are engineering the reactors, the power conversion, the liquid cooling and the heat network as a single campus. The constraint on AI infrastructure is no longer the chip. It is power, and the years it can take to get power delivered. We designed this campus so that the power is generated where the compute sits, behind the meter."

"Every data center produces heat, and most of them pay to throw it away," Kinsman said. "Our thermal design treats heat as a product. The campus is designed to sell data center waste heat through a metered thermal network so users can take the heat we would otherwise reject. This is what the next generation of sustainable data centers will look like."

Heat as a product, not a by-product. The high-density data halls are designed around closed-loop warm-water direct-to-chip liquid cooling, with dry heat rejection as the primary and ultimate campus heat sink. The campus is a low-water design with an annual water-use-effectiveness planning target. Thermal energy storage is planned as an optimization asset; the campus has no grid-scale battery, and its only planned energy store is thermal. Waste heat is planned to be made available to third-party industrial process and other non-industrial users through a campus thermal network, with thermal capacity reservation, metered thermal energy and thermal interconnection as the planned service model. Those users would finance, build, own and operate their own facilities. The campus is designed to reject all of its required heat on its own, so heat reuse is an optimization and a sustainability benefit rather than a dependency.

Long-term, power-backed capacity. Island Roadhouse sells long-term, power-backed, liquid-cooling-ready data center capacity and facility services. Customers bring and operate their own compute; Island Roadhouse does not sell electricity, cloud compute or GPU-as-a-service as its base business. Phase 1 is planned to offer up to 154 MW of sellable IT load and is targeting commercial operation in 2034. A Phase 2 expansion is planned under the campus master plan.

About Island Roadhouse Data Centers

Island Roadhouse Data Centers is developing an integrated, low-water, atomic-powered data center campus in Missouri, combining on-site advanced atomic generation, high-density liquid-cooled data halls, dry heat rejection and heat reuse for third-party industrial and agricultural users. The company sells long-term, power-backed, liquid-cooling-ready data center capacity and facility services to customers who bring and operate their own compute. Learn more at www.islandroadhouse.com.

Media contact
David Kinsman
Chief Technology Officer, Island Roadhouse Data Centers
[email protected]
+1-314-495-0066

SOURCE Island Roadhouse Data Centers