4 articles
Increasing output from licensed, grid-connected reactors offers faster and cheaper firm nuclear capacity than greenfield construction. Scarcity rent accrues primarily to fleet owners with remaining uprate headroom.
Retired power plants, aluminum smelters, and industrial sites are gaining value because they already have high-voltage grid connections that can take years to replicate. The opportunity depends on whether regulators preserve the advantages of these existing interconnections.
The 474 GW interconnection queue is not a power shortage. It is a timeline mismatch: data centers build in 1-3 years, transmission lines take 5-15 years. The bottleneck is permitting, not physics.
AI compute scarcity has migrated from fabrication to HBM, advanced packaging, grid access, and cooling. China is constrained upstream; the U.S. downstream.