by bdidu ai
In recent days, the United States’ nuclear energy sector has reached a genuine historic turning point. For the past half-century, nuclear technology in America has been effectively locked in a regulatory cage—constrained by environmentalist opposition and political hesitation. But now, former President Trump has signed four executive orders aimed at dismantling that cage, unleashing nuclear development in ways unseen for decades.
The measures strike at four key bottlenecks:
- Fixing supply chain vulnerabilities and ensuring domestic fuel production, reducing reliance on foreign imports.
- Loosening regulatory red tape to accelerate nuclear deployment.
- Paving the way for small modular reactors—some so compact they can be transported on a single truck and power individual factories or data centers.
- Opening nuclear investment to venture capital, introducing competition and Silicon Valley-style innovation into the sector.
The results were immediate—U.S. nuclear energy stocks soared. But more importantly, the underlying logic is clear: America’s power grid must be retooled to sustain the next generation of intelligence industries.
For years, observers have said the essence of AI is compute, and the essence of compute is energy. The AI race is, at its core, an energy-and-compute war. Algorithms alone are no longer the differentiator—what matters is who controls the most stable, affordable, and scalable electricity. Modern AI is simply the transformation of power into computation and computation into productivity.
This is why Trump’s nuclear push is about far more than energy policy—it’s about ensuring America’s strategic dominance in the AI era. And strikingly, the companies standing beside him were not just the old nuclear giants but a wave of new startups—cross-industry teams blending AI and energy, heralding the seeds of a new industrial revolution.
The logic is simple: electricity is intelligence. The more power you generate, the more intelligence you can create. And intelligence, in turn, determines a nation’s economic, military, and technological future.
Contrast this with Europe, which shuttered both nuclear and coal plants under the banner of environmental fundamentalism, effectively hollowing out its future energy base. Civilization has always advanced through higher energy consumption—per capita energy use is a direct marker of progress. The idea of a “low-energy future” is a regression to the primitive.
If AI advances far enough, it may even help humanity crack nuclear fusion, unlocking true energy freedom and completing a virtuous cycle: energy drives compute, compute drives intelligence, and intelligence unlocks new energy.
China, too, has its advantages—not just in nuclear, but in solar and wind. Western China’s vast reserves of renewable power can bypass traditional grid bottlenecks, supplying localized compute centers directly. This “green electricity into compute” pathway could form China’s distinct strategic edge.
Trump’s orders set ambitious targets: 10 new large-scale nuclear plants by 2030 and a fourfold increase in capacity by 2050. Unsurprisingly, U.S. nuclear stocks jumped over 20% on the news. The driver behind this rally is the same force reshaping the global energy map: the explosion of AI data center demand.
Gigawatt-scale compute hubs are now under construction in multiple U.S. states. Existing state and national grids cannot sustain this demand. The solution? Each new hyperscale compute center will require its own nuclear plant nearby.
But here lies another challenge: uranium. Goldman Sachs recently warned of a structural shortage, with a projected deficit of 130 million pounds by 2040. Uranium prices are already trending upward, opening massive long-term opportunities in the nuclear supply chain.
For decades, the world turned its back on nuclear. Contracts expired, plants were shuttered, and uranium was practically unsellable. Now, in the age of AI, nuclear has become not just viable but essential—the only scalable, reliable energy source capable of supporting artificial intelligence until fusion arrives.
In short, the AI revolution is colliding with the energy revolution. Nuclear power is back at the center of geopolitics, not as a relic of the past but as the backbone of the digital future.