Just months after President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at reigniting the U.S. nuclear energy sector and initiating the construction of 10 new reactors by 2030, U.S. companies are already moving rapidly on this front. Two major announcements in the last couple of days underscore that momentum:
- Clean energy developer Brookfield Asset Management will take over and resume construction of two AP1000 reactors at the VC Summer site in South Carolina—projects that were originally abandoned in 2017.
- Fermi, a data center operator, has announced a partnership with Hyundai Engineering & Construction to begin engineering work on four AP1000 reactors for a massive data center complex in Texas.
Fermi’s project is particularly notable: the company plans to create a private 11 GW power grid integrating four large nuclear reactors with small modular reactors (SMRs), combined-cycle gas turbines, solar power, and large-scale battery storage.
Together, these developments signal an aggressive push to make nuclear energy the backbone of high-density data center operations. They also highlight strong support from technology firms and infrastructure developers, and an increasingly favorable regulatory environment. As we commented last Friday, the U.S. administration is reportedly seeking to accelerate grid connection reviews for data centers from the current multi-year process to just 60 days.
Interestingly, these nuclear initiatives showcase a highly globalized supply chain, well represented across our Nuclear and Powering AI portfolios. While the AP1000 technology was developed by U.S.-based Westinghouse (a subsidiary of Cameco and Brookfield), Fermi has turned to Korean firms Hyundai Engineering and Doosan Enerbility for key design and construction roles. Hyundai will provide site layout planning and cooling system design, while Doosan will manufacture critical long-lead components such as reactor pressure vessels and steam generators. Siemens Energy has also signed on to supply steam turbines and control systems.
If the pace of nuclear buildout continues to accelerate, the industrial supply chain could soon face the same bottlenecks already seen in other energy segments—such as multi-year lead times for turbines for gas-fired plant and power transformers. The situation may be even more acute in nuclear equipment, given that many suppliers have operated at low utilization levels since Fukushima (2011) and have scaled back capital expenditures or exited the market altogether.
As a result, we expect significant pricing power across the nuclear equipment and component supply chain, which should translate into sharply higher profit margins over the coming years.
