The AI boom is driving up electricity demand, helping fuel a revival of nuclear power. And the Trump administration is fully on board.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to help finance NextEra Energy’s plans to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa.
The nuclear plant operated for more than 45 years before shutting down in 2020. NextEra had already planned to close the plant later that year, but a storm damaged parts of the facility and forced it offline several months early.
Google announced last October that it was working with NextEra to restart Duane Arnold and explore deploying more nuclear power around the country. Under the deal, Google signed a multi-year agreement to buy power from the plant, helping make the investment needed to restart it financially viable and cover the cost of energy production.
“We expect Duane Arnold to be back online in early 2029, and the plant will provide more than 600 MW of clean, safe, “always-on” nuclear energy to the regional grid,” Google said in a blog post at the time.
The electricity will help support Google’s growing cloud and AI infrastructure in Iowa. The company also announced last year that it was investing an additional $7 billion in the state over two years, including in new and expanded cloud and AI infrastructure.
Once restarted, the Energy Department says Duane Arnold will add 615 megawatts of power to the grid, enough to power nearly 500,000 homes. The department also says the project will help drive down electricity costs.
Google isn’t the only tech company turning to nuclear power to fuel its AI ambitions. A Microsoft-backed project to restart Constellation Energy’s Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania, formerly known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, received a $1 billion Energy Department loan last year.
Meanwhile, Meta announced earlier this year that it had reached agreements with several companies to support up to 6.6 gigawatts of new and existing nuclear power by 2035.
Major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are all pouring billions of dollars into data centers and other infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful AI models. All of that infrastructure requires a lot of electricity.
The Trump administration has also gone all-in on expanding nuclear power to help meet growing electricity demand. President Donald Trump signed several executive orders last year aimed at speeding up nuclear development. One of them directed the Energy Department to stop most of its previous plans to dilute and dispose of surplus plutonium and instead establish a program to process the material and make it available to private companies.
Even Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, has gotten in on the action, announcing last year that it would merge with private nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies in an effort to help “America win the A.I. revolution.”
NextEra Energy and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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