A South Carolina utility hopes to restart construction of a power plant that was shelved eight years ago after budget overruns led to the bankruptcy of an iconic American company.

State-owned utility Santee Cooper, hoping to capitalize on the data center power boom, is looking for a partner to help finance and complete two reactors at the Virgil C. Summer nuclear power plant, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Plant is a single-reactor nuclear power plant. Santee Cooper is leading the construction of two new reactors, with expansion work beginning in 2008. The unfinished project was halted in 2017 after an audit showed project costs ballooned from $9.8 billion to $25 billion and that completion was taking far longer than expected. Causing it to miss out on $2 billion in federal incentives.

This futility led to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric Company, the nuclear power company that was the precursor to one of America's first electric power companies. It also resulted in the conviction of two executives of SCANA, Santee Cooper's project partner, for securities fraud.

The two reactors under construction are sisters to a pair installed at the Vogtel power plant in Georgia. After years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the Vogt expansion project finally came online in 2023, casting a pall over the entire U.S. nuclear power industry.

Despite VC Summer's troubled history, Santee Cooper is optimistic it will find a buyer as demand for power from artificial intelligence data centers soars and interest in nuclear power revives.

The utility has some tailwinds: Microsoft recently signed a deal with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, and Meta is looking for developers to propose 1 to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear power capacity. Sandy Cooper reportedly wants to sell it to a consortium that includes a technology company interested in gaining access to electricity.

Any deal Santee strikes will still face some potentially thorny political issues. Part of the cost of VC's summer expansion was imposed on ratepayers because of state law that allows utilities to write off the cost of new nuclear reactors. Completing the expansion and finding a power buyer may help ease the burden. As a state-owned utility, politicians will undoubtedly be interested in any deal, good or bad.