President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would fast-track approval for AI companies to build nuclear reactors at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The proposal is aimed at reducing AI data center’s load on the existing energy grid. Trump said he would approve applications to build reactors in just three weeks.
“Trump talked for about 10 minutes about energy in his speech, making it clear Trump views a straining electric grid as a central economic risk of 2026,” Fortune’s Eva Roytburg writes. “As artificial intelligence pushes electricity demand to record highs, the administration is framing power shortages as an existential threat to growth and national security. Slashing approval timelines, Trump argued, is a necessary response to an energy system he said he believes is fundamentally unprepared for the AI era.”
“We needed more than double the energy currently in the country just to take care of the AI plants,” Trump said.
The process to approve new nuclear reactors usually goes through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which usually approves new projects every four to five years.
Trump said while he was previously skeptical of nuclear energy, new “progress” has won him over to considering the energy source, saying his administration was “very much into the world of nuclear energy.”
“The proposal marks a radical departure from the traditional Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) process, which historically requires four to five years for environmental and design approvals as well as rigorous site selection,” Roytburg writes. “Trump claimed that while tech leaders initially “didn’t believe him,” he assured them the government would deliver approvals for oil and gas plants in just two weeks, with nuclear projects following in three.”
Read the full story in Fortune.
