The US is falling behind our competitors in building new nuclear power plants, even as the demand for electricity to fuel the growth of AI is exploding. President Trump is offering a new twist to the AI industry. Build your own plants, and the administration will fast track your approvals. Mikenzie Frost reports from South Carolina, where she found one startup racing to revive the nuclear industry.
The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.
Chris Gatch: Every time you do something on your phone, something happens in a data center.
Chris Gatch works with DC Blox in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The company is a digital hub, where fiber optic lines from all over the world deliver torrents of data to fuel artificial intelligence.
Mikenzie Frost: So how much would you say, how much energy would you say it takes to do an AI search compared to a regular internet search?
Chris Gatch: Yeah, so a regular internet search probably uses enough energy to light a light bulb for maybe 10 seconds. And na AI search, like a chat box search, probably two to three minutes.
The US is leading the world in expanding artificial intelligence. Last year, AI startups raised a total of $159 billion in private investment. At the same time, new AI data centers are being built, driving energy demand that is expected to more than double in the next five years.
Tech giants like Google, which rely heavily on AI to power tools like Flow — where entire video scenes are created and edited without a human — are securing long-term nuclear energy agreements to meet their growing power needs.
Meta, parent company of Facebook, secured power from a nuclear plant in Illinois. Microsoft is working to restart a reactor at the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania. Amazon and Google are making similar moves.
Chris Gatch: I think nuclear has to be part of the conversation because I don’t think ultimately we want to, for the next 20, 30, 40 years, build this amount of incremental capacity, um, and have it all be carbon based power.
Source: Sharyl Attkisson
