PreussenElektra and NVIDIA will study AI factories at Germany's former nuclear plant sites

What PreussenElektra and NVIDIA announced

On 21 October 2026 Guido Knott, chairman of PreussenElektra's management board, announced a planned collaboration with NVIDIA to check whether the company's former nuclear power plant sites could host what both firms call AI factories. The English press-release page is live on PreussenElektra's newsroom; the full German text was also carried the same day by Mainfranken News, which quotes Knott and NVIDIA's Markus Hacker at length.

The stated goal is modest. PreussenElektra will bring knowledge of the sites, their energy and location infrastructure and the available land. NVIDIA, as technology partner, will set out what AI factories need and what technical site concepts might fit. Together they will decide at which sites, and under which conditions, a more concrete project would make sense. Both sides stress that the review is open-ended: NDR and NWZ both quote PreussenElektra saying that no investment or site decision is attached to the announcement.

PreussenElektra is the E.ON subsidiary responsible for shutting down and dismantling eight nuclear power plants in Germany. All of those plants are already offline; each is in a different phase of dismantling. As that work progresses, the company says it is creating the conditions for reuse.

Why a shut nuclear plant looks like an AI site

Knott's case for the sites is the same one data-centre developers make across Europe: large industrial plots, powerful grid connections and established infrastructure. A plant that once exported hundreds of megawatts already has a connection into the high-voltage network. That connection, not the reactor building, is the scarce asset. Land that is already zoned and served for heavy industry is the second.

Markus Hacker, a senior regional director at NVIDIA, put the same point in NVIDIA's language. "AI factories are dependent on a reliable energy supply, suitable land and powerful infrastructure," he said, as quoted by Mainfranken News and NDR. Former industrial sites, he added, could play an important role for the next generation of data centres. That language matches how NVIDIA has been selling containerised DSX Pod AI factories at GTC Berlin: the limiting factor is a ready site, not a chip shipment.

GEroundtable's English write-up makes the constraint explicit. Projects are already dying on grid timelines; a decommissioned nuclear plant inverts the usual problem because the connection and the industrial land already exist, while dismantling continues for years and leaves that grid inheritance in place.

Which sites are in the conversation

Neither company has published a shortlist of the eight sites. Regional reporting has filled in names. NDR says the Lower Saxony plants at Unterweser (Wesermarsch), Grohnde (Hameln-Pyrmont) and Stade are among those PreussenElektra is responsible for, and that they could come into question. NWZ focuses on Kleinensiel, the Unterweser site: the reactor was shut in March 2011 after almost 33 years, nuclear dismantling began in February 2018, the four steam generators were removed last year, and earlier company figures put the end of nuclear dismantling around 2032, with conventional dismantling taking another two to three years after that.

Mainfranken News leads with Grafenrheinfeld in Bavaria, another of the eight sites, and ran an archive photo of steam-generator removal there. Voltgrid, citing radio aktiv, names Grohnde in the Weserbergland as one location under discussion. None of those reports claims a shortlist or a preferred site; they report local interest in plants that sit in PreussenElektra's portfolio.

NDR also notes a plant that is not in scope. The former Emsland plant at Lingen is being dismantled by RWE, not PreussenElektra. An RWE spokeswoman told NDR that dismantling there is expected to run into the 2030s and that there are no concrete reuse options at the moment.

How this fits NVIDIA's German AI push

The announcement lands in the same week Jensen Huang was in Germany for GTC Berlin, where he argued that Europe should be a central actor in what he called the AI economy. NWZ ties the PreussenElektra study to that visit. It also follows a German physical-AI declaration of intent with NVIDIA signed on 19 October by the economy and research ministries, and a growing list of German capacity commitments from hyperscalers.

Amazon has already told Berlin it will invest more than 16 billion euros in Germany in 2027, including 4.8 billion euros for the AWS Frankfurt region. Those figures are for existing cloud regions and labs, not for former nuclear sites, but they show why utilities that still hold industrial land and grid tickets are talking to chip vendors. The same week, NVIDIA was also in Kazakhstan discussing 45,000 GPUs for Firebird under a US export licence — another reminder that site and power deals now travel with the chips.

What NVIDIA would do at a PreussenElektra site, if any project moves past the study, has not been spelled out. The press materials cast NVIDIA as a technology partner that defines AI-factory requirements and concepts, not as an announced tenant, builder or equity partner.

What has not been decided

The companies are clear about what this is not. There is no named site, no megawatt figure, no GPU count, no investment amount and no construction timeline. PreussenElektra calls the work a first step to evaluate technical, infrastructural, economic and regulatory conditions. Concrete decisions would come later, if at all.

Dismantling schedules also set a floor under any reuse. At Unterweser, NWZ's earlier company figures put the end of nuclear dismantling around 2032. Even if a site's grid connection can be reused sooner, the land itself may not be free of nuclear work for years. The study has to answer whether an AI factory can share a site that is still being dismantled, or whether it must wait.

Water is another open constraint that NDR flags for northern German data centres in general, not for this project specifically. AI factories that rely on evaporative cooling compete for the same groundwater that other industries and towns use. Nothing in the PreussenElektra announcement addresses cooling design.

Limits and open questions

AI Lookout could not retrieve the full body of PreussenElektra's English press-release page from this network on 25 October 2026 (HTTP 403 to automated clients). The title, URL and address block are confirmed; the quotes and operational claims in this article are taken from Mainfranken News's same-day German report of the announcement, from NDR and NWZ, and from GEroundtable's English summary that cites the PreussenElektra announcement and Bloomberg.

No megawatt, investment or GPU numbers appear in those sources. Claims that former nuclear sites are "ideal" for AI factories are the companies' own. Germany's nuclear phase-out completed on 15 April 2023; that date is background, not part of this week's announcement.

Why it matters

Europe's AI buildout is short of ready power and ready land more than it is short of chips. PreussenElektra's eight shut plants are one of the few places where both already exist under one owner. Whether any of them becomes an AI factory is still an open study — but the fact that NVIDIA is the partner doing the study shows where the industry is looking.