⤵️ The axis of US decline: anti-data center, anti-AI, anti-nuclear
Opposing one technology used to be enough; now the same activists line up against three at once
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
The following pair of public-opinion polls (both from the always informative Heatmap) will no doubt hearten Down Wing activists who (a) hate artificial intelligence for myriad reasons, (b) hate the idea of nuclear energy powering AI, and (c) hate the idea of nuclear-powered AI increasing humanity’s productive capacity and material progress.
Up Wingers, on the other hand, should find these survey results concerning, even demoralizing. I mean, it isn’t complicated. If you think the application of machine intelligence could mean a massive upgrade in our civilizational ability to solve our biggest problems today and new ones tomorrow, then you want to see the continued buildout of the physical backbone of the AI Revolution—including data centers.
A lot of that infrastructure is already being built, and a lot more is on tap. Goldman Sachs says private data-center construction has accelerated sharply, with a significant backlog still not under construction, and its equity research team now expects the four largest hyperscalers—Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet—to spend a combined $5.3 trillion in capex from 2025 through 2030.
Regular folks have lots of (mostly unfounded) worries about electricity and water usage, as well as about AI itself—threats both job-related and existential—that data centers enable. But I have little doubt some activists are not only concerned about those issues but see data centers as a welcome new attack vector against the ongoing nuclear revival.
It must have been incredibly galling for old-school environmentalists to see Constellation Energy is restarting the undamaged Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, now renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, to provide a reliable, carbon-free energy supply for Microsoft’s AI data centers. The 1979 TMI accident was, after all, pretty much the final nail in the coffin for the further expansion of American nuclear energy in the 20th century.
Five decades later, not much has changed: This from the Sierra Club, the country’s largest environmental organization:
The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy. Although nuclear plants have been in operation for less than 60 years, we now have seen three serious disasters. Tragically, it took a horrific disaster in Japan to remind the world that none of the fundamental problems with nuclear power have ever been addressed.
While the Sierra Club was not one of some two hundred environmental groups (including Greenpeace USA) signing a letter demanding a halt to new US data centers, the organization’s data-center page is essentially nothing but worries—certainly nothing that frames any aspect of them as a positive, or as possibly contributing to solving environmental problems through AI.
To continue the logic chain: if AI is at best a problematic innovation, as the activists see things, then certainly we shouldn’t be expanding another troubling innovation—nuclear energy—to power it.
No wonder many of these groups are already against small modular reactors even before they’ve sent a single electron into the grid. As a new JPMorgan report explains, these warehouse-sized supercomputers have become the most conspicuous source of new electricity demand, and that demand is improving the economic case for SMRs, which is making them interesting to Wall Street.
According to the megabank, data centers consumed roughly 4.4 percent of American electricity in 2023. No doubt it’s more now, and by 2028 the share could reach 12 percent. The hyperscalers have noticed this, which has been great news for the fledgling SMR companies. As seen in the slide below, Oklo has secured a 1.2-gigawatt deal with Meta. Amazon has put more than $300m into X-Energy alongside a 5-gigawatt order. Google has signed with Kairos Power. Companies racing to build AI capacity need firm, round-the-clock power that wind and solar cannot reliably provide.
Those hyperscaler investments aside, plenty else has been cooking in the space over the past year:
In May 2025, federal regulators approved NuScale’s upgraded 77-megawatt reactor design, a step that doesn’t authorize construction but does give the company a stronger foundation for eventually getting license approval.
Then in December, the Department of Energy selected the TVA and Holtec for up to $800 million in cost-shared funding to advance early SMR projects in Tennessee and Michigan.
The biggest milestone came in March 2026, when TerraPower received a construction permit for its Natrium reactor in Wyoming. It was the clearest sign yet that an advanced reactor project has moved beyond slide deck presentations.
In May, Dow and X-energy cleared an environmental review for four advanced reactors at an industrial site in Texas, while Utah’s revived Green River project could give Holtec another place to build and prove its small reactor design.
When thinking about these groups and their opinions about AI, data centers, and nuclear energy, consider an intriguing alternate-history scenario from an Up Wing perspective. What if the United States had followed through on a 1960s Atomic Energy Commission plan to construct a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000?
One version of that thought experiment has been explored by For All Mankind on Apple TV, which is built on the premise that the US-Soviet space race never ends. An earthly dividend of that continuing contest is that the federal government keeps pouring money into scientific research, ultimately cracking nuclear fusion. In the show, a fictional James Hansen—the real NASA climate scientist who famously warned Congress about global warming in 1988—testifies that warming has slowed thanks to widespread fusion power.
But I don’t think you even need that sort of technological leap to imagine huge benefits from a nuclear-powered American economy. Maybe things would have played out something like this:1
Again, decline is a choice. What sort of future will America choose this time?
This timeline was generated by Claude through an obvious prompt: Give me an Up Wing, alt-history if the US had kept expanding nuclear energy as was envisioned in the 1960s.
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