Nuclear renaissance is hyperscaler PR hype, experts agree
Nuclear power promises carbon-free, round-the-clock energy for critical infrastructure and now perhaps data centers. The problem? We've heard talk of a nuclear renaissance before.
Are we entering, or currently in, a nuclear power renaissance? That question has been asked since the turn of the century, and though we haven't seen the kinds of blazing progress one would associate with a "renaissance," we're still asking it today, largely due to AI and hyperscalers.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft recently signed multiyear, multimillion-dollar power deals to boost U.S.-based nuclear energy. The Trump administration also gave the green light to nuclear power through executive orders in 2025 to increase the country's nuclear capacity by accelerating the licensing process and deploying advanced reactors, while federal agencies also began working with private enterprises to bring shuttered power plants back online.
Americans' growing need for electricity, driven in part by the boom in AI and cloud services, demands a constant energy supply. Nuclear power seems to offer a convenient way to address this problem while offsetting the carbon emissions that make other energy sources problematic. However, while nuclear power has many benefits and generates promising headlines, experts are somewhat skeptical that it will become a dominant power source anytime soon.
"At this particular moment, we don't have nuclear power plants which you can put next to a data center," said Vaclav Vincalek, the virtual CTO of Hiswai, an AI-powered search platform, and founder of Recurrent Patterns, a newsletter exploring strategies and insights around leading companies, technology and trends. "Until then, this whole conversation is useless."
Other experts are not so pessimistic. Nuclear energy adoption in the U.S. will start showing progress within the next decade, said Koroush Shirvan, PhD., Atlantic Richfield career development professor in energy studies at MIT. But the current conversation about using nuclear energy to power data centers is marketing pushed by companies, particularly hyperscalers, that want to appear environmentally conscious, he added.
"It is a bit of greenwashing," Shirvan said. "You see with a lot of this data center [marketing] they've got the nuclear power plant background, but then you look at what is on the bill, what has been ordered … it's almost exclusively natural gas."
Vincalek agreed that much of the talk surrounding hyperscaler investment in nuclear power is merely a ploy to feign environmental stewardship. Marketing from hyperscalers often centers on responsibility and the idea of the "friendly neighborhood corporation," he said. "[Yet] when was the last time they said, 'We are here to care about humanity?' Never. So why suddenly care about the environment?"
It appears that the latest episode of America's nuclear renaissance is built on a foundation of hope and tactful marketing. But it remains to be seen whether there's a viable path forward for nuclear energy and whether it could help resolve the looming energy deficit we're facing in powering AI data centers.
Why we're hearing about a nuclear renaissance
American attitudes on nuclear power have shifted dramatically since its inception in the 1940s. Gallup polling revealed that two months after the explosion and subsequent meltdown at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, 73% of Americans said they were against the construction of a nuclear facility in their area. This was up from 60% in 1979, the same year the U.S. experienced a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania.
As of 2025, 59% of Americans support expanding nuclear power to generate electricity in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center polling. The turnaround in attitude toward nuclear began during the first George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. In the face of rising fuel and gas prices, the U.S. government passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, offering financial incentives to the nuclear power industry to promote growth in the sector. This recommitment to nuclear power after decades of anxiety around the topic led industry leaders to coin the period a "nuclear revival" or nuclear renaissance.
As time passed, Americans grew more receptive to the idea of nuclear power -- and not only due to rising fuel prices. Heightened awareness of climate change and commitments to sustainability have attracted more people to nuclear power and are top reasons we're seeing increased private investment in the nuclear sector, Shirvan said.
"We wouldn't be discussing nuclear if it weren't for climate change, because otherwise you just build gas and coal [plants]," he said. "We also wouldn't have this conversation now without hyperscaler support really bringing massive amounts of private investment into nuclear."
In 2024,Microsoft formalized a deal to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island and has invested $16 billion to purchase the electricity generated by this reactor to power its AI data centers. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has partnerships with Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to create advanced reactors, from which Alphabet will also purchase power. Amazon is currently purchasing power from the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, another nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, and is investing in small modular reactors (SMRs). And earlier this year, Meta announced expansion of its nuclear investments in plants in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Initial operations for these projects and agreements are estimated between 2027 and 2032.
I think people should be optimistic about nuclear power. It's a reliable, abundant source of energy. That's what people should be after.
Vaclav VincalekVirtual CTO of Hiswai and founder of Recurrent Patterns
By investing in nuclear power, these large enterprises could address two of the biggest concerns about data center buildouts: reducing carbon emissions from traditional energy sources and easing the strain on local power grids.
Shirvan was hesitant to say whether private enterprises are investing in nuclear power because of earnest efforts to combat climate change, or to create a more "positive public persona" for themselves. But whatever the reason, nuclear energy could provide real benefits as a power source for data centers.
Benefits of nuclear energy
It's not surprising hyperscalers would choose nuclear energy to power their data centers. On paper, it seems like the perfect power source, providing the following benefits:
Reliability. Nuclear power plants operate continuously without disruptions due to frequent maintenance, refueling or environmental factors associated with solar panels and wind turbines. Nuclear also has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source, producing reliable energy over 90% of the time these plants are operational, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Clean energy. Since nuclear power plants don't burn fossil fuels, they are carbon-free power sources. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear power generates nearly 775 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. This avoids more than 471 million metric tons of carbon each year, the equivalent of removing 100 million cars off the road.
Low operating costs. While the upfront investment to build a nuclear power plant is large, the ongoing operating expenses for these facilities are fairly small compared to other energy sources like oil, coal or gas. Plus, the uranium used to fuel these plants accounts for only a small percentage of the overall cost structure and lasts for years, reducing the effects of inflation.
Grid stability. In the face of a possible energy crisis fueled by AI advancements and U.S. data center proliferation, nuclear power offers an option to alleviate grid strain. Nuclear power can complement other renewable energy sources, and advancements in SMR technology could enable specific modular reactors to scale electricity generation up and down depending on demand.
With benefits that could improve business operations and strengthen national energy infrastructure, it makes sense that many businesses and federal agencies are championing the nuclear renaissance and investing in companies advancing nuclear power.
So why are experts criticizing the idea of our latest nuclear renaissance?
Nuclear renaissance: A reality check
Despite their varying levels of optimism or pessimism about the potential for nuclear energy as a viable power source for data centers and critical infrastructure in the U.S., experts who spoke to TechTarget all agreed on one thing: The nuclear technology needed to spur a renaissance doesn't exist yet. Not only that, but the development and construction timeframe for nuclear facilities is estimated at around two decades.
We need nuclear technologies that are able to accelerate construction time by having lower footprints, but still an appreciable amount of power such that you don't need to combat the economy of scale as much.
Koroush Shirvan, PhD.Atlantic Richfield career development professor in energy studies at MIT
When a company decides today that they want to build a nuclear power plant, they must start with environmental studies, then obtain permissions and then budget, Vincalek explained. Given the number of steps and complexity, he said it would take roughly 20 years to become fully operational when starting from scratch. Even companies that could mass-produce SMRs are still 10 to 15 years away from seeing the first production-ready systems, he added.
"In theory, it sounds great," Vincalek said. "It's not wrong to think that we should have a modular energy center close to the data center. It's just that we are so far from implementing the idea because we don't have the technology yet. And even if we have the technology, you have to have the production, and I don't think anybody can predict now what will happen in 10 to 15 years."
Time is of the essence in meeting the power demands of data centers, but nuclear power currently can't keep pace, said M.V. Ramana, PhD., professor and Simons Chair in disarmament, global and human security at the University of British Columbia.
"If we are talking about the so-called small modular reactors, which have been the subject of a lot of announcements, these are not reactors that we've had any experience building," he said. "These are paper designs or PowerPoint designs. There's no real-world experience. It's going to take even longer to build some of these things than nuclear reactors with which we have had experience building."
SMRs will also cost more per unit of electricity generated than large reactors, because they lose out on economies of scale, Ramana added. While SMRs require lower upfront capital and offer faster construction times, greater scalability and location flexibility, they have a higher cost per megawatt-hour because they require multiple smaller units to match the output of one larger, optimized unit.
"To solve this problem, we need nuclear technologies that are able to accelerate construction time by having lower footprints, but still an appreciable amount of power such that you don't need to combat the economy of scale as much," Shirvan explained.
Since nuclear power for data centers is still far off, hyperscalers will need to rely on other energy sources to power their AI initiatives for years to come. This highlights the fundamental disconnect between these companies' words and actions. While they're investing in nuclear energy as a potential fix for the AI-driven energy crisis we're facing, the time it will take to bring these facilities online, coupled with the reality that we don't know how much energy we will need in two decades to keep up with competitive AI development shows that they might just be using nuclear energy to save face rather than as a serious option.
"The demand for power for these data centers is right now," Ramana said. "They're not thinking about what it's going to be in 10 years from now … because we really don't know if this business model that [hyperscalers] are using is going to actually pay for all of these things. [AI] is a bubble that's going to burst at some point ... It is unlikely to be the way it is right now in 10 years, which is the earliest we can imagine that some of these new reactors might be coming online."
Even so, hyperscalers are proudly sharing news of their nuclear deals today, betting with money they have now that future investments will pay off big. These deals stem in part from immediate political gain and from the fact that investment now is a small drop in the bucket for these gargantuan AI vendors.
"The nuclear industry over the last decade or so has done a very successful PR campaign marketing nuclear as the kind of clean green solution, so it's a very bipartisan thing," Ramana said. "Many Democrats, many Republicans are talking about it because they have basically swallowed all the talking points of the nuclear industry."
The amount of money hyperscalers and tech companies have invested in nuclear energy is just "peanuts" to them, Ramana added. Their investments aren't trailblazing -- they aren't even a significant line item on their budgets. "Why won't the big tech companies take advantage of all that PR to say, 'see, that's why we're going nuclear,'" he said.
Vincalek shares a similar position, likening hyperscalers and AI companies to children receiving money from their parents to fund their lifestyles.
"It's cute," he said. "Imagine you are completely broke, you're dependent for existence that you're getting money from your parents, and you start talking about how you're going to buy your next fancy car, which doesn't exist yet. These companies, like OpenAI or Anthropic, the more money they get, the more money they lose. For them to even entertain these ideas only shows you how distracted they are."
Is there a future for nuclear-powered data centers?
Maybe we can't feasibly rely on nuclear energy to power our data centers just yet. The economies of scale are working against us; we don't have the technological capacity to harness this energy effectively, and we are racing against time to supply data centers with the power they need. However, that doesn't mean nuclear power at scale is an impossible dream. The real question is, should we pursue it, and if so, how can we pursue it responsibly?
The U.S. isn't the only country seriously considering nuclear power. French President Emmanuel Macron said France has the capability to "be at the heart of the artificial intelligence challenge" because of the country's operational nuclear power plants. With ready access to this kind of energy infrastructure, France will be able to build more data centers, positioning itself as a competitive player in the AI development race.
"I think people should be optimistic about nuclear power," Vincalek said. "It's a reliable, abundant source of energy. That's what people should be after, because then you can achieve your goals with shutting down all the coal plants, the things which pollute your air, the things which pollute your countryside."
Vincalek also believes civilization will eventually come to depend on nuclear energy for advancement. "Every single time civilization made progress, and the magnitude of progress, it was always because there was a new source of energy which allowed us to do better things," he said. "We don't have enough energy for society to leap forward, to have new materials, to understand better quantum mechanics and all that."
Shirvan is optimistic about the future of nuclear energy but very aware of the challenges we will face in implementing this technology at scale. "I think we need to get together and address the cost and deployment challenges," he said. "We're a growing economy, and we're going to need all of the options to be able to generate electricity for the growing AI sector."
Another challenge, despite current trends, remains nuclear power's history of unsafety as an energy source. In 2023, Germany shut down its remaining nuclear power plants, the result of a decades long risk appraisal that showed citizens weren't comfortable with using nuclear energy, considering its history of meltdowns and regardless of their cause. The country is also moving away from fossil fuels, instead turning to a diversified system of renewable energy sources for power and sustainable growth.
But growth should not be the bottom line, Ramana said. "We live on a finite planet, and we can't keep growing forever on a finite planet," he said. "That's the basic reality. I want to push back on the idea that growth has to happen. We need to think about how we can live within planetary limits, ecological limits. That's the question, I think, which we should all be engaging in."
Everett Bishop is an associate site editor for TechTarget's AI & Emerging Tech group, covering AI, quantum computing and other emerging technologies.
