Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other major tech companies are locking in contracts with nuclear startups to secure reliable power for AI data centers. The rationale is straightforward: AI infrastructure runs continuously, consumes enormous amounts of electricity, and needs stable baseload power that solar and wind can’t reliably provide without storage that doesn’t yet exist at sufficient scale. Nuclear, which had been commercially stagnant for decades, is suddenly the destination of serious capital.

Nuclear power was supposed to be a fading technology. Expensive, politically toxic after Fukushima, outcompeted by renewables. The reversal now underway is genuine and worth understanding.

The driver is AI. Data centers powering large language models and the infrastructure they require consume enormous and rapidly growing amounts of electricity. Unlike residential or commercial demand, these loads are constant — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Solar generates during the day. Wind generates when the wind blows. Nuclear generates all the time, regardless of conditions. For a tech industry trying to guarantee power availability at scale, nuclear has become newly attractive precisely because of the attribute that made it economically awkward in a grid context: it does not stop.