Trump’s team demands gas and nuclear plants to fuel the AI boom – here’s why your next LLM deploy might black out without it.
AI training runs are power hogs, and with data centers exploding, Trump’s admin just called for an emergency auction to build coal, gas, and nuclear plants – explicitly skipping renewables[4]. As devs scaling LLMs, we’ve felt the strain: outages, skyrocketing cloud bills, regions throttling GPU access. This is Uncle Sam saying ‘build baseload power or bust’ to keep AI lights on[4].
For you, the practical dev? It means planning for unreliable grids if this flops – no new coal plants in a decade, nuclear’s notoriously late and overbudget[4]. I’m bullish on AI but skeptical: gas might bridge the gap short-term, buying time for SMRs (small modular reactors) that hyperscalers like Microsoft are chasing. But if Trump pushes too hard, expect regulatory whiplash affecting colo costs everywhere.
Honest opinion: AI’s energy appetite is the elephant nobody wants to tame. Tools like efficient inference (think quantization) are our stopgap, but systemic fixes like this are crucial. Devs, how are you optimizing power in your stacks? This policy could make or break 2026 deploys.
Source: Japan Times