# Trump administration bets $17.5 billion on nuclear reactors to power America’s AI appetite > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 11:14:37+00:00 # Trump administration bets $17.5 billion on nuclear reactors to power America’s AI appetite The DOE is backing ten new reactors across five sites as data center electricity demand threatens to triple by 2028 The US government just made its biggest bet on nuclear energy in decades, and the reason isn’t climate targets or energy independence. It’s artificial intelligence. The Department of Energy announced $17.5 billion in loans to finance the construction of ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors across five sites, with the goal of having them operational by the mid-2030s. The initiative is part of a broader plan to quadruple the country’s nuclear generation capacity from roughly 100 GW to 400 GW by 2050. ## Why nuclear, why now Data centers currently consume about 4-5% of total US electricity. Projections suggest that figure could triple by 2028. When you’re training large language models and running inference at scale, the power draw is relentless and constant, exactly the kind of load that nuclear handles well. Solar and wind are great, but they come with an inconvenient trait: intermittency. A data center running billion-dollar AI workloads can’t politely pause operations when the wind dies down. Nuclear reactors, by contrast, run around the clock with capacity factors north of 90%. Back in May 2025, an executive order classified AI data centers at or coordinated with DOE facilities as critical defense infrastructure. Two months later, another executive order accelerated federal permitting for data centers with AI loads exceeding 100 MW, explicitly listing nuclear power as a permissible energy source. ## The money and the mechanics The $17.5 billion in DOE loans represents the public side of the financing equation. On top of that, there’s the potential for $5 billion in equity from utilities and Westinghouse, bringing the total investment pool north of $20 billion. Seven utilities have signed letters of intent for new reactor sites. The AP1000 design, made by Westinghouse, is a Generation III+ pressurized water reactor. It’s the same technology that powers the Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, the only new nuclear reactors built in the US in over three decades. Those two units famously ran years behind schedule and billions over budget. The administration’s approach tries to address that history by streamlining permitting and co-locating facilities on federal land. The DOE has been mobilizing key sites such as the Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge to support the co-location of AI infrastructure with advanced reactors. ## What this means for energy markets and crypto The intersection of energy policy and digital asset mining has always been one of the most underappreciated dynamics in crypto. When cheap, abundant power becomes available, miners show up. It happened with hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest. It happened with stranded natural gas in West Texas. Miners are already competing with AI companies for access to cheap power. Some mining operations have literally sold their facilities to AI firms because the economics of running GPU clusters for inference are more favorable than running ASICs for hash power. Proof-of-work mining’s environmental footprint has been the industry’s most persistent PR problem. Mining operations powered by nuclear energy, which produces zero direct carbon emissions, would effectively neutralize that criticism. Several mining companies have already explored partnerships with nuclear facilities for exactly this reason. The risk side of the ledger is equally important. Nuclear construction has a long history of cost overruns and delays. The AP1000 technology is proven but not cheap. If the mid-2030s timeline slips, the gap between AI power demand and available supply could widen rather than narrow, intensifying competition for existing power resources and potentially pushing electricity prices higher for all industrial consumers, miners included. **Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).