By Haley Zaremba
Publication Date: 2026-03-31 21:00:00
Tech giants Microsoft and NVIDIA are collaborating on an artificial intelligence project designed to accelerate the development of nuclear energy – in order to feed the growing energy needs of AI. The project aims to develop an “ecosystem of AI-powered digital engineering tools” that will be used to shorten the considerable timelines of nuclear power plants and bring them online a lot more quickly as the rate of energy demand growth continues to skyrocket around the world.
The nuclear power sector in the United States is beset with bottlenecks ranging from complicated and costly bespoke design and engineering processes to lengthy regulatory processes characterized by miles and miles of red tape. The most recent nuclear power plant to come online in the United States, Georgia’s Plant Vogtle, showcased exactly how devastating and extensive these delays can be. When the plant was finally completed in April of 2024, it had taken 15 years and $35 billion to complete, making it the most expensive infrastructure project of any kind in United States history.
“The project has been such a bloated disaster that many pundits think it could be make-or-break for the wholesale future of the United States nuclear sector,” I wrote about Vogtle back in 2024. “But there are two ways to interpret the cautionary tale presented by Vogtle: either you think that the lesson is not to build new reactors, or the lesson is to build nuclear reactors better.”
Big Tech is clearly…
