Valar Atomics has proposed a data center campus with 456 small modular reactors (SMRs) totaling up to 9.6GW of electrical capacity on more than 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management territory near Price, Utah, some 199 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

NPR and the Salt Lake Tribune first reported the plan. The development, known as Project Beehive, would sit in Carbon County and include data centers, a nuclear fuel production facility, and facilities for storing nuclear waste, according to a proposal the company submitted to federal regulators that NPR reviewed.

Construction could start as soon as the end of the year. The first reactors would come online in 2028, with full build-out by 2032. That timeline is ambitious: no company anywhere has yet put an SMR into commercial operation, though multiple firms are developing competing designs.

What land does the project need?

Roughly 650 acres of the project would occupy state land, in addition to federal acreage. Details of Valar's proposal appeared in a land use agreement shared at a recent Utah Trust Lands Administration meeting.

The Bureau of Land Management's Utah office confirmed it has received the company's application.

"We are currently reviewing the application for completeness," the bureau told NPR. As the application moves through the required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process, "we will make sure the public has meaningful opportunities to provide input," the office added.

Valar addressed its own schedule directly: "No construction begins before permits and approvals, and the public process leads along our internal targets set the pace," the company told NPR.

How far along is Valar's reactor technology?

Founded in 2023, Valar Atomics is developing a Generation IV high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR). Its 5MW advanced reactor design, the Ward 250, completed a zero-power fueled criticality demonstration at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County in June.

In July, the company powered up the test reactor and used a simple thermoelectric system to run a single Nvidia GPU — a modest but concrete demonstration of the design's generating principle.

For Project Beehive, Valar aims to deploy 25MW reactors rather than the 5MW test configuration. The campus would also produce thermal heat for potential reuse alongside its electrical output.

Is anything else planned in Carbon County?

Yes. The Salt Lake Tribune also reported that Altigen Energy, a developer of natural gas power plants for data centers, is targeting an area east of Wellington for a 1,200-acre project called "Jurassic Spark." Wellington sits roughly six miles south of Price.

That site would start with 250MW of natural gas capacity and eventually scale to 3GW. Altigen filed its application for the project with Carbon County in March.

Together, the two proposals would put Carbon County at the center of a multi-gigawatt buildout serving data center demand, split between nuclear and gas generation.