- All of the major hyperscalers have inked nuclear power deals to meet rising electricity demand from AI
- Trump has said he wants to increase power generation
- The President-elect appointed oil industry exec Chris Wright an oil industry exec who also sits on the board of nuclear startup Oklo - as his Energy Secretary
Forget the FCC, FTC, and DoJ. It’s actually another three-letter U.S. agency — the DoE or Department of Energy — that could decide the fate of the tech sector over the coming years.
The country’s energy grid is already straining under the weight of an initial wave of cloud compute demand that sparked the proliferation of data centers in major markets. Now a second round tsunami of growth in both data centers and energy demand driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening to swamp the whole dang machine.
“Very simply, there isn’t enough power available to run AI,” Gartner Research VP Bob Johnson recently told Fierce. Thus, new energy sources are needed to keep progress on track. The catch? “Nobody likes coal, nobody likes natural gas. Wind and solar, when you throw in enough batteries to keep them going full on” to meet the uptime needs of data centers “are completely uneconomical,” Johnson added. So, despite its bad rep, nuclear has emerged as the frontrunner to power the future.
Indeed, all of the major hyperscalers have settled on nuclear power as key for the future, inking procurement agreements with a range of partners. Of course, these deals won’t come to fruition overnight, meaning energy policy over the coming years could make or break their plans.
So, what is President-elect Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear energy? Well, we have a few indicators.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast prior to the election, Trump seemed to indicate a preference for nuclear power versus other ‘green’ energy sources like windmills. He also praised France’s approach of building compact nuclear plants.
“I expect that the Trump administration will be very much in favor of using any and all means of power generation, and that includes nuclear,” Jack Gold, founder and analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Fierce. Gold added that this effort isn’t just about bringing down energy costs. It’s also about adding capacity to the grid.
The capacity issue in particular is currently “a major problem as the large data centers take huge amounts of power to run their 100,000 to 200,000 Nvidia GPU chips at 1KW each. And we haven’t been building new generation facilities in this country to keep up with demand — not just nuclear but of any fuel type.”
The Wright stuff
Perhaps a greater indication of what’s to come on the nuclear front specifically can be extrapolated from Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary: Chris Wright. Wright is not only CEO of oil company Liberty Energy but also sits on the Board of Directors for small modular reactor startup Oklo.
Oklo has already lined up a demand pipeline totaling 2.1 gigawatts of consumption and is aiming to begin deploying its technology as early as 2027 starting with a site in Idaho. Data center companies Equinix and Prometheus Hyperscale are among those to have signed a power purchase agreement with Oklo.
Wright will not just head the Department of Energy but also according to an NPR story, reportedly sit on Trump’s newly formed Council of National Energy, which will be comprised of “all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy," NPR reported.
Gold pointed out that Wright has a “vested interest” in making nuclear deployments happen. And facilitating this will likely mean reducing red tape.
“Building nuclear plants, even small scale ones, does not happen overnight. It can take years, especially with all of the regulations in place,” Gold concluded. “I’d expect the Trump administration to pull back on some of the regulations and make it easier to build out new facilities.”
Read our reporting on what to expect from the Trump 2.0 administration here.