DAILY TRIFECTA: A/I Is Going Nuclear

There's nothing new under the invisible sun

THE SET-UP: Neil Chatterjee wants to beat China’s artificial intelligence (A/I) like a drum. That’s why the two-term chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is drumming-up support for a rapid expansion of energy infrastructure. Chatterjee, whose two terms came during Trump’s first administration, currently serves as the Chief Government Affairs Officer at a solar energy company …but he’s not beholden to the sun.

Writing in Utility Drive, Chatterjee advocates an all-of-the-above strategy for “winning the AI competition with China.” To get there, he calls on Congressional Republicans to “pass legislation reducing the timelines for pipelines and transmission lines alike to support Trump’s energy dominance mandate.” It’s not quite “drill, baby, drill,” but if you’re gonna drill, you’re gonna need pipelines. And if you’re gonna “burn, baby, burn” in a climate inferno, you’re gonna need to deliver the electricity to the power-hungry data centers on the front lines of the Cyberspace Race. Basically, DeepSeek is the new Sputnik and the Cold War has been rebooted. That’s why Chatterjee says:

An America First AI agenda will require every available transmission technology to pull off. Without an expanded transmission system, the U.S. will cede its leadership in the AI race.

Chatterjee is not alone.

There’s good reason to believe that A/I is the flame that’s transformed tech’s man-children into MAGA moths. Unlike Steve Bannon, they seem far more obsessed with beating each other than they do China, but the bottom line is still the same—either way they want access to a lot of energy, to a lot of water and to quick, painless permitting. Frankly, they’d like to eliminate regulatory oversight altogether. That’s essentially what they are getting, too. Lee Zeldin is taking the “P” out of the EPA and the Grokfather is crippling the Federal regulatory system with his chainsaw. Laws become irrelevant if there’s no one there to enforce ‘em.

Although this digital version of the arms race looks as unstoppable as the nuclear build-up of the analog Cold War, I still have to ask:

What does it mean to “win” the A/I race with China?

I understand why Elon wants to beat Sam Altman and why the Tech Broligarchs are competing for the title of “biggest dick” in cyberspace. I was a teenage boy once, so I get it. Comparing dicks and being dicks are features of their programming. And disruption is something they do simply because they can. Move fast. Break things. People are things to them. They won’t hesitate replace bureaucrats or programmers or call center staff or anyone else their specific brand of A/I can render obsolete. Lost jobs will be points on the A/I scoreboard. (BTW, it’s no coincidence that Tech Bros seem enamored with fertility, eugenics and replacement theory.)

But what about the United States? What’s the motivation for the American people? What do they get out of climate-altering concessions to the A/I arms race? What does beating China at A/I look like? What will the US win? How will Americans know they won? Will there be a peace treaty? Or will America’s A/I just become the master of China’s tech infrastructure? Will the US be the Biggest Brother of all?

Or is this really just about having the best autonomous weaponry? Is it just about staying one step ahead in the competition to kill each other? If so, the Tech Broligarchs who are poised to profit from the conversion from an analog Cold War to a digital Cold War haven’t really “innovated” anything. - jp

TITLE: The SMR Gamble: Betting on Nuclear to Fuel the Data Center Boom
https://www.powermag.com/the-smr-gamble-betting-on-nuclear-to-fuel-the-data-center-boom/

EXCERPTS: At the end of January, Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek unveiled two large language models (LLMs)—DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-zero. Unlike previous generations of AI models, DeepSeek’s breakthrough reduced the compute cost of AI inference by a factor of 10, allowing it to achieve OpenAI GPT-4.5-level performance while consuming only a fraction of the power. The news upended future electricity demand assumptions, rattling both the energy and tech sectors. Investment markets reacted swiftly, driving down expectations—and share prices—for power generation, small modular reactor (SMR) developers, uranium suppliers, gas companies, and major tech firms.

Yet, amid the chaos, optimism abounded. Analysts pointed to Jevons paradox, the economic principle that efficiency gains can increase consumption, rather than reduce it. “Our model shows a ~90% drop in the unit cost of compute over a six-year period, and our recent survey of corporate AI adoption suggests increases in the magnitude of AI use cases,” said Morgan Stanley Research. The U.S. remains the dominant market for AI-driven data center expansion, with 40 GW of new projects under development, aligning with a projected 57 GW of AI-related compute demand by 2028. Already, that load is transforming the energy landscape. A recent POWER analysis shows that U.S. data center electricity consumption could reach between 214 TWh and 675 TWh annually by 2030, up from 176 TWh in 2023. [Terawatt Hour (TWh)]

That has dramatically raised the stakes, igniting a desperate frenzy across both the power industry—which must generate and deliver reliable electricity for a variety of emerging large load consumers—and the data center industry, which is scrambling to procure firm scalable energy to sustain its explosive growth, now and well into the future. The stakes are fueled by real fear. In November, research firm Gartner projected that power required for AI data centers could reach 500 TWh per year by 2027, a 2.6x increase from 2023 levels. It warned that power shortages could restrict 40% of AI data centers by 2027 and drive up energy costs.

The upfront cost of power is no longer the deciding factor for data centers, speakers at the Sustainable Data Centers Summit in Dallas, Texas, suggested in early February. “It’s crazy because we look at like the state of Oregon is about 6 GW, and you have these large hyperscalers [asking] ‘Can I get 6 GW too?’ ” said Mohammed Hassan, senior technical program manager for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sustainability. Hassan suggested the industry has had to rethink how it approaches energy planning and procurement completely to align with incentives, address regulatory hurdles, and secure long-term reliability. “Solar and wind has taken off in the lead. But if you look at the needs of 2045, in trying to meet the Paris Agreement, solar and wind won’t be enough, so you have to look at what’s the next step.”

In September, Microsoft and Constellation Energy committed $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1, now rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, with a targeted 2028 reopening. Other deals are under discussion by Vistra for Comanche Peak in Texas; Public Service Enterprise Group, possibly for Salem and Hope Creek in New Jersey; and Constellation Energy, possibly for Calvert Cliffs in Maryland. Meanwhile, though AWS has sought to expand the Cumulus data center’s load, co-located with Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear station in Pennsylvania, to 480 MW, the proposal was blocked by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which cited concerns about grid cost allocation and reliability impacts, and the dispute has moved to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. So far, according to trade group the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), 45% of the 95 existing units in the U.S. have expressed interest or planning in data centers, with at least 25 sites looking to fulfil power requirements ranging from 400 MW to 1,920 MW.

Deals have also abounded for advanced nuclear, including SMRs and microreactors, even though their commercial viability hasn’t yet been demonstrated. In September, Oracle announced plans to build a gigawatt-scale data center powered by three SMRs, securing building permits as part of a push to expand its cloud infrastructure. In October, Google signed a pioneering Master Plant Development Agreement with Kairos Power to develop a 500-MW fleet of molten salt reactors by 2035. That same week, Amazon unveiled plans to back 5 GW of new X-energy SMR projects, starting with a four-unit, 320-MWe Xe-100 project in Washington with Energy Northwest, alongside a Dominion Energy partnership to explore a 300-MW SMR near Virginia’s North Anna Power Station. In December, Oklo partnered with Switch, a Las Vegas-based data center designer, builder, and operator, to deploy 12 GW of Aurora powerhouses through 2044 in a historic deal hailed as “one of the largest corporate clean power agreements ever signed.”

“When it comes to producing electricity, I wouldn’t say there’s any one advanced reactor technology that jumps out as being optimized solely for data center applications,” said Patrick White, research director of think-tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA). “But what we’re seeing is that these reactors have the potential to provide the kind of high-reliability, cost-stable, and emissions-free power that data centers are increasingly seeking.”

The key reason SMRs are gaining traction over larger gigawatt-scale nuclear plants relates to siting flexibility, he explained. Industry is looking at deploying “tens or hundreds of megawatts at a time, which can make it a lot simpler in terms of siting it with whatever demand, wherever the electricity demand actually is,” he noted. But, in addition, he said many of these advanced designs will be engineered to have “a reduced water demand for cooling water or to eliminate the need for cooling water entirely, by looking at things like direct air cooling.” That also opens up a wider range of potential siting options, including the possibility of co-locating nuclear power plants directly with data centers, he noted.

The more concerning question surrounding the integration of advanced nuclear with data centers is whether nuclear can scale fast enough to meet the industry’s growing power demands. The first SMRs from companies like GE Hitachi and X-energy aren’t expected to be operational until 2029–2030, and while microreactors might arrive sooner—around 2027–2028—the scalability of the smaller units remains uncertain.

“The question is not whether nuclear can power data centers—it’s whether data centers are willing to wait for nuclear,” White noted. “Data centers could be nuclear’s first customers, pulling tech to commercialization—but will they commit for the long haul?”

TITLE: Amazon, Meta, Google sign pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/12/push_for_nuclear/

EXCERPTS: A group of large-scale energy users including Amazon, Meta, and Google has thrown its weight behind efforts to ramp up global nuclear capacity – aiming to triple it by 2050 – to meet increasing energy demands.

The cross-industry collective has signed a pledge supporting the goal of at least tripling nuclear capacity around the world by 2050. Other signatories include 14 major global banks and financial institutions, plus energy companies like Occidental and heavy industry conglomerates such as Japan's IHI Corporation.

Prompted by the World Nuclear Association, this call is said to be the first time that businesses beyond the nuclear sector have publicly backed a large-scale expansion of atomic power to meet their own predicted energy needs.

Nuclear energy currently generates 9 percent of the world's electricity from a total of 439 reactors.

The pledge recognizes that energy demand in many industries is expected to increase significantly in the coming years, despite ongoing efficiency and optimization efforts.

As The Register has covered before, the datacenter industry is one example where power consumption has been rising rapidly, driven by the booming interest in AI training, although other trends such as electric vehicles and the electrification of industries like steel foundries are also adding to the burden.

Goldman Sachs recently forecast that energy use in the datacenter sector is likely to more than double by the end of the decade, while a separate analysis warned that Americans could face a 70 percent hike in their electricity bills by the same time, unless action is taken to boost capacity.

Large-scale users depend on a stable and abundant energy supply for their business operations, and the pledge notes that nuclear is able to provide round the clock power independently of the weather, season, or geographical location.

It states that a resilient economic growth strategy should include increasing the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear power, and calls on governments to enable atom-powered capacity deployment by ensuring that nuclear fission and other energy sources have equal access to finance.

And all this ignores the fact that nuclear power is controversial, due to the risks posed by radiation from incidents such as the Chernobyl disaster in present-day Ukraine, and the challenge of managing nuclear waste, including spent fuel, which could pose a long-term hazard.

TITLE: Microsoft is open to using natural gas to power AI data centers to keep up with demand
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/microsoft-is-open-to-using-natural-gas-to-power-ai-data-centers-ameet-ballooning-demand.html

EXCERPTS: Data center developers increasingly see natural gas as near-term power solution despite its carbon-dioxide emissions. The Trump administration is focused on boosting natural gas production. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday that renewable power cannot replace the role of gas in producing electricity.

“We’ve always been cognizant that fossil will not disappear as fast as we all would hope,” [said Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president of energy]. “That being said, we knew natural gas is very much the near-term solve that we’re seeing, especially for AI deployments.”

Exxon Mobil and Chevron announced last December that they are entering the data center space with plans to develop natural gas plants with carbon capture technology. Chevron struck an agreement with gas turbine manufacturer GE Vernova in January in build gas plants for data centers “with the flexibility to integrate” carbon capture and storage technology.

Hollis declined to say whether Microsoft is having conversations with the oil majors. The executive said the tech company is having “discussions across the board with all of those technologies.”

President Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum in January that he will use emergency powers to expedite the construction of power plants for data centers. Trump said the data centers can use whatever fuel they want. Chevron and GE Vernova announced their plan to build gas plants for data centers days after Trump’s remarks.

“We’re just glad to see that there’s a focus on accelerating schedules to meet what we view as a pretty critical need,” Hollis said when asked about the Trump administration’s plans.

But deploying natural gas faces its own challenges. The cost of new natural gas plants has tripled and the line to build plants now extends to 2030, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said Monday. NextEra is the largest developer of renewables in the U.S. but also has gas assets.

“Renewables are ready to go right now because they’ve been up and running,” Ketchum said at the conference. “It’s cheaper and it’s available right now unless you already have a turbine on order or that’s already been permitted.”

Ketchum said nuclear is unlikely to be a power solution until 2035. NextEra is considering restarting the mothballed Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa.

SEE ALSO:

CERAWeek: Natural gas pitched as tonic for power-hungry AI
https://www.eenews.net/articles/ceraweek-natural-gas-pitched-as-tonic-for-power-hungry-ai/