(The Epoch Times)—The emergence of cloud computing in the early 2000s and generative artificial technology in the 2020s has exponentially increased the U.S. technology industry’s demand for electricity.
In the coming decades, the massive data centers that power new technology will need far more energy than they currently consume.
Data centers in the United States are poised to consume more than 30 times more power in 2035 than they do currently, and government officials and tech giants are betting big on a once-vilified power source: nuclear energy.
New federal directives and billions of dollars in corporate investment are aimed at rapidly bringing next-generation nuclear reactors online while reshaping the U.S. energy mix and rewriting its regulations.
Data Center Demand
Since the launch of Amazon Web Services in 2006, cloud computing and storage solutions have revolutionized the way the world works, learns, and plays. But the rapid growth of the data centers that run the services is creating an incredible demand for electricity.
In an April report, a team of authors at Deloitte, led by Executive Director Kate Hardin, said U.S. data centers currently use about 33 gigawatts (GW) of power annually (enough to power about 27.5 million U.S. homes). That demand is projected to grow to 176 GW by 2035, according to the report.
“Nuclear energy presents a potential solution for meeting some of the growing electricity demands of data centers, with its reliable and clean energy profile,” Hardin and her co-authors wrote.
Currently, the Deloitte report states, nuclear is already punching above its weight in terms of electricity generation. Nuclear sites in the United States provided more than 19 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024 while representing less than 8 percent of overall generating capacity.
In 2023, fossil fuels generated 60 percent of the nation’s electricity, nuclear generated about 19 percent, and sources such as wind and hydropower produced about 21 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In July, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman joined President Donald Trump at an event in Pittsburgh to speak about the company’s $20 billion investment in the Keystone State. One plank of that plan is locating a new data center campus in Salem Township, near Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
Amazon is investing heavily in nuclear energy. In a statement published in May, it called nuclear “a safe, carbon-free energy source that can be brought online at scale.”
The company stated that it has spent more than $1 billion on nuclear energy projects and technologies.
Representatives of the leading cloud service providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Google either declined or did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
However, in a September 2024 announcement, Microsoft Vice President of Energy Bobby Hollis said the company signed a power purchase agreement with the energy company Constellation that will enable the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, an 835-megawatt nuclear facility in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, that was fully retired in 2019.
In a statement, Hollis said the move was part of the company’s commitment to becoming a “carbon negative company.”
On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island suffered a partial nuclear meltdown. While nobody died in the incident, it is regarded as the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history.
Despite optimism from the leading cloud service providers, nuclear is currently the smallest component of the U.S. energy mix.
Right now, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the country, according to the Deloitte report. These reactors are, on average, about 40 years old.
Given the current pace of maintenance and expansion, Deloitte estimated that nuclear power will provide about 10 percent of the overall projected electrical demand to data centers in the United States by 2025.
Representatives of the Department of Energy (DOE) who spoke with The Epoch Times said the country’s nuclear infrastructure will likely greatly exceed those projections within the next decade, especially now that Washington is demanding rapid expansion of nuclear generating capacity.
Political Will
On May 23, Trump signed four executive orders that the White House stated would “usher in a nuclear renaissance.”
The orders call for aggressively expanding nuclear energy production in the United States and set a goal of quadrupling nuclear energy generating capacity by 2040.
They call for 10 new large reactors to be online by 2030, as well as for accelerated development of nuclear reactor technologies, use of nuclear power for artificial intelligence infrastructure and military installations, and expedited construction and testing of advanced nuclear reactors.
One of the orders also overhauls the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calling it a failure. The reforms are aimed at speeding up regulatory approvals and updating the commission’s safety models. The commission was established by Congress in 1978 to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials. The order states that since it was created, only two new reactors have come online.
“Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” the order reads.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, a senior official at the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy said the executive orders are already paying dividends.
The official highlighted recent public–private partnership announcements focused on small modular reactors. Those partnerships with the DOE involve firms such as Amazon, Dow, X-Energy Reactor Co., and TerraPower.
Currently, the DOE has $800 million set aside to help fund the initial deployment of small modular reactors. These smaller versions of nuclear fission reactors are designed to be built off-site and rapidly deployed in power plants.
To further accelerate novel reactor technology development, a senior official said the DOE established what it calls a test bed at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho. There, reactors can be tested under DOE authorization. In July, the Idaho National Laboratory announced that both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are involved with active projects to streamline novel reactor deployment.
Given the president’s requirement to test at least three new reactors by July 2026, the senior official said that it is “definitely very feasible” that at least one of the novel reactors tested at the Idaho National Laboratory will be deployed by 2030.
Apart from the Idaho National Laboratory, interest in testing novel reactor technologies remains high. So far, the DOE is receiving far more applications to begin trials than it was initially expecting before the executive orders were signed.
As for beating the Deloitte estimate, senior officials did not provide a specific expectation of how much energy nuclear will provide to data centers in the future. However, they did say that if the United States can get 10 large, GW-generating nuclear plants under construction by 2030, as the executive order calls for, then nuclear will provide “a significant fraction” of the power that data centers need to function.
Lingering Doubts
Because of incidents such as the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, and the more recent Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, some environmental activists oppose nuclear energy.
Representatives of leading activist groups such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
In its most recent article on the subject, the Bulletin questioned “whether government intervention can make new nuclear reactors built on [artificial intelligence’s] timeline without compromising safety or repeating past mistakes.”
In a July 22 appearance before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Stephen Burns was highly critical of the Trump administration’s reforms, which he said undermine the independence of the agency and could put safety at risk.
“Great care must be taken in streamlining licensing and regulatory processes to preclude erosion of nuclear safety standards,” Burns said. “Nuclear safety, not regulatory acceleration, must be the bedrock of this effort.”
Despite the history of high-profile accidents, public opinion polling from Gallup and Pew shows that Americans are generally supportive of nuclear power.
The most recent poll, published by Gallup in April, reported that 61 percent of respondents said that they favor the “use of nuclear energy as one of the ways to provide electricity.”
The DOE considers nuclear power plants to be one of the safest ways to generate power. Even countries that previously banned nuclear—including Germany, which decommissioned its final plant in 2023—are “waffling” on that decision, a senior official said.
The senior official acknowledged that getting new power online will be difficult, but echoed the comments of Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
“This is America,” Wright said in a July 22 interview with Fox News. “We put people on the moon. Can we build nuclear reactors again? Absolutely.
“Is it going to be a challenge? Do a lot of things have to change to get this ball rolling again? Yes. But can we do it? Yes, we can, and yes, we will.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.