In this aerial view, the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant stands in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 10, 2024.
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Nuclear power may be making a comeback in the U.S. after years of setbacks — and big tech is the driving force.
As tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google compete to take the lead in the AI revolution, the data centers needed to power the burgeoning technology consume an ever-increasing amount of energy.
In the last two months, those three companies have penned deals to generate more nuclear power — perhaps most notably, Microsoft struck a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of the most serious nuclear meltdown in U.S. history in 1979. The reopening is planned for 2028.
Speaking to CNBC at the annual International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, long-time energy market veteran Dan Yergin described the turnaround as nothing short of extraordinary.
“It’s amazing, the change. The nuclear industry was in the doldrums,” Yergin told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday, describing the reopening of the Three Mile Island power plant as “symbolic.”
“Big Tech is saying, ‘We need reliable 24 hour electricity. We can’t get it just from wind and solar’,” he said.
Yergin, who has written several books on energy including “The Prize” and “The New Map,” pointed to the booming funding going into the sector. He cited $7 billion in venture capital going into nuclear fusion alone — which does not include financing for nuclear fission, a different energy-generating process.
“This is a really big change, and it reflects in this country, in the United States, a sense that — we’ve had for, really, a generation of flat demand [for] electricity,” Yergin said. “Now it’s going to grow, and there’s real anxiety about, how do you grow it? And nuclear [energy] is back in form, and people are talking about small nuclear reactors. And, of course, you have big tech actually seeking to contract for the output of the electricity from existing nuclear power plants. It’s an amazing change.”
Electricity demand is surging after staying largely flat for some 15 years, fueled by new data centers, factories, electric vehicles, and hotter and longer summers. A recent Energy Department memo cited in numerous press reports projected that U.S. power grids could see as much as 25 gigawatts of new data center demand by 2030.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it had closed a $1.5 billion loan for the revival of the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan in late 2025, which would make it the first American nuclear plant to be restarted. Google in mid-October said it would purchase power from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “deliver on the progress of AI.”
Global electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency sector is expected to double from an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 TWh in 2026, according to a research report from the International Energy Agency.
— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
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