Project Cayman has a land deal, not an offtake

One Nuclear has signed a binding letter of intent to develop a 2.88GW natural gas plant and a 700MW/2.88GWh battery system alongside a colocated data center at a site between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That is the first concrete milestone for Project Cayman, but not the one that pays for it: the project sits near the RiverPlex MegaPark in southern Louisiana, and the data center's capacity, timeline, and potential partners remain undisclosed. A binding LOI secures land; it does not secure the load that will pay for the generation.

The agreement is with a prominent Louisiana landowner group, and One Nuclear's CEO Richard Taylor is already promising reliable energy for 'one of Louisiana's most important industrial regions' — a ribbon-cutting quote with the key economic fact absent: no data center operator named, no power purchase agreement disclosed, no offtake price attached to the generation. In a market where hyperscaler-anchored assets get infrastructure pricing and everything else fights for capital, Project Cayman is a bet that a tenant will emerge.

One Nuclear is an energy platform, not a utility, based in Florida and developing large-scale natural gas plants with plans to phase in advanced small modular reactors once they are commercialized. Its model anchors a site with on-site gas generation, then replaces that power with SMRs sourced from a third-party vendor. The company has three active development sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Washington; Louisiana applies that template to a colocated data center, a pairing that makes sense because data centers need power now and in a decade.

That timeline is the same hedge this publication saw in Ireland's nuclear opening: fission is a fix for the 2030s, and data centers need electrons in the 2020s. One Nuclear's bridge is gas, and the battery — 700MW with 2.88GWh of storage, roughly four hours at rated power — is sized to absorb short-duration interruptions or grid anomalies, but its economics, like the gas plant's, depend on the colocated customer that has yet to appear. The storage component is perhaps the project's clearest marker of intent: 700MW of responsive power for about four hours is the kind of resilience envelope a data center operator would demand, and without an operator's name on a contract, that capacity is merchant exposure.

What a binding LOI does is lock up the site and the developer's time, not close a project finance document; the LOI gives One Nuclear exclusivity to pursue development, but the capital stack — construction debt, equity, and the power purchase agreement that supports both — remains unwritten. For an infrastructure investor, the announcement is a claim on a location, not revenue, and the real due diligence, for all the talk of GW and GWh, is the identity of the data center partner.

Community outreach is already underway, with public information meetings scheduled from September through December 2026 across local parishes, government agencies, and other stakeholders. That roadshow prices the same social license that Ohio data centers paid $18 million for; community toleration is a line item in the capital stack, and the Louisiana meetings are the first installment. The calendar runs to the end of the year, and the project's backers will need those sessions to convert into local support before the first permits advance.

Louisiana is the right place to buy patience. Meta is developing an up to 5GW campus in Richland Parish, Amazon has multiple campuses in the state, and the RiverPlex MegaPark location puts Project Cayman near transmission and an industrial corridor between two metro areas. What the site lacks is the digital-infrastructure offtake that would turn a merchant gas plant into a contracted asset. The LOI is binding on the landowner group, and One Nuclear will presumably pay for exclusivity or option rights, but financial close will hinge on converting a vague data center plan into a signed power purchase agreement with a tenant whose balance sheet can underwrite 2.88GW.

One Nuclear's announcement is a project milestone without an owner or offtake terms, wearing the vocabulary of infrastructure. Project Cayman is real, but it is not yet financed; the gas plant and battery are the straightforward part, the counterparty is the hard part. One Nuclear's gas-to-SMR narrative is compelling enough to attract landowners and attention, but the market will accept it as infrastructure only when a hyperscaler or colocation provider signs a contract. The public information meetings begin in September; the first offtake signature has no date.