The AI Power Crunch Goes Nuclear

There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of a Navy admiral named Hyman Rickover

About 70 years ago, he ran the tightest program the U.S. military had ever seen up to that point. 

It turns out that he was constructing the first nuclear reactors meant to power warships.

Again, nobody had done this up until this point. 

In fact, Rickover personally interviewed every officer who wanted in on his program. He grilled them for hours, often humiliating his candidates on purpose just to see how they’d hold up under pressure. 

But he wasn’t cruel for the sake of it. 

You see, he knew full well how unforgiving a nuclear reactor could be if you take shortcuts. All it takes is one bad welding job, or overlooking something during an inspection, and you can bet you won’t get a do-over. 

That’s why he built a culture of extreme pressure, which came with a huge payoff.

By 1955, the USS Nautilus was the first vessel in history to operate submerged, indefinitely, without ever surfacing for fuel.

That’s the deal with nuclear power. 

However, today we’re watching a similar story play out. 

Except this time, it’s not admirals building warships. 

This time we’re watching hyperscalers building data centers. 

And now, they’re bolting nuclear power directly onto their own operations, and it’s not surprising. Why? 

Let’s face it, nearly every single story about AI this year has focused on chips. 

Nvidia, TSMC, the export controls, the GPU shortages. To be fair, that’s perfectly fine because it’s a very real part of the AI race. 

But there’s a catch buried in this ongoing AI boom… 

You can have all the chips in the world, and it doesn’t matter one bit if you can’t plug them in.

That’s the problem now. 

And the fix, it turns out, is the same fix Rickover reached for seventy years ago.

Right now, there are three stories that tell us everything we need to know to see what’s coming down the road. 

You might’ve seen when Amazon restructured its power purchase agreement with Talen Energy in June 2025. In one move, the tech giant locked-in up to 1,920 megawatts from the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania through 2042. 

In fact, Talen projects the contract could generate up to $1.4 billion in annual revenue once fully ramped. 

Of course, Amazon paired that deal with a $20 billion Pennsylvania investment commitment, representing its largest state-level private-sector pledge in company history. 

Now these two players are building momentum on developing small modular reactors on Talen’s own site.

Meanwhile, Microsoft struck its own 20-year deal with Constellation Energy in September 2024 to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1. 

They even rebranded it the Crane Clean Energy Center. 

Constellation is targeting a 2027 restart, a year ahead of the original plan, and in November 2025 secured a $1 billion federal loan from the Department of Energy to help cover the $1.6 billion project cost.

Then we have Meta, who inked their own 20-year nuclear PPA with Constellation more than a year ago, securing up to 1,121 megawatts out of the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois. 

In case you’re keeping track, that would keep this plant online well past the expiration of its state subsidies.

We’re not talking about charity here for some new source of power. These are hard-nosed contracts with decades-long revenue visibility attached.

That’s the game-changer. 

Here in the U.S., our electricity demand has relatively stayed flat for nearly two decades. 

Then all of a sudden the needle started moving in 2025. 

That’s when total U.S. electricity consumption hit a record 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours (which doesn’t mention the fact that the EIA expects it to keep climbing through 2026 and 2027), with commercial demand overtaking residential demand for the first time ever.

That is all because of the push for more and more data centers, which are driving more than half of that demand growth; the desk jockeys over at Goldman even expect power demand for these future data centers to more than double next year. 

I’ve told you before, the AI arms race’s real chokepoint isn’t silicon anymore. 

This has become an energy story. 

Okay, we both know that Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta aren’t nuclear companies. 

The truth is that they’re just the customers.

They can sign the PPAs, write the checks, and move markets from the headlines alone, but Big Tech can’t build themselves the reactors they’re going to need. 

That exposure belongs to the companies actually operating the plants and servicing the fleet, effectively putting themselves in a position to supply the next generation of reactors these hyperscalers are quietly begging for.

Finding that investment gem isn’t easy, but we’ve seen one in particular that keeps showing up at the center of this boom — Amazon-backed, sitting right at the intersection of the AI power crunch and the nuclear buildout everyone’s suddenly racing to fund.

Let me show you the full details on that opportunity here.