By Haley Zaremba
Publication Date: 2026-03-21 17:00:00
To meet the enormous energy demands of the artificial intelligence boom, energy expansion and innovation will be required on an unprecedented scale. After decades of stagnant energy growth in the United States, the rapid expansion of energy-hungry data centers across the country is pushing the public and private sectors to invest in new energy generation and extending the life of existing power plants—and that still won’t be enough.
“There is no way to get there without a breakthrough,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It motivates us to invest more in the merger,” he continued.
The AI boom has indeed been a major catalyst for investment, research and development in the field of nuclear fusion. Altman’s own fusion startup Helion Energy just reached a major milestone earlier this year when it achieved an ultra-hot plasma temperature of 150 million degrees. And Helion is far from alone – a whole host of…
