Investor Michael Burry issued a public appeal for the U.S. government to prioritize a massive financial commitment toward expanding nuclear power and upgrading the national electricity grid. On Friday, Burry urged President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to fast-track a $1 trillion program focused on deploying small modular nuclear reactors across the country while simultaneously constructing a hardened and modernized electrical grid. He framed this strategic initiative as indispensable to meeting the surging electricity consumption driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom and sustaining American innovation against the backdrop of intensifying global competition from China.
In a social media post on platform X, Burry highlighted the risk of looming power shortages emerging as a critical constraint to economic growth and technological advancement. He advocated for an accelerated execution timetable, emphasizing that protracted regulatory approval processes must be circumvented to realize the project’s goals efficiently. Burry connected abundant energy availability with maintaining long-term U.S. national security and the country’s fiscal health, noting that sufficient power supply will be vital to tackling challenges such as debt management.
This call to action comes amid a rapidly growing electricity demand fueled by the expansion of AI technologies, including data centers and cutting-edge manufacturing facilities that require immense power loads. Technology industry voices have largely echoed Burry’s urgency, pinpointing regulatory complexity as a major obstacle in scaling energy infrastructure to meet AI growth requirements.
Daniel Newman, the CEO of Futurum Group, shared Burry’s commentary and underscored the regulatory environment’s impact on AI development. He suggested that regulatory delays represent the ‘‘single biggest bottleneck’’ hindering the realization of AI’s full potential. Newman dismissed concerns about an AI bubble by affirming the genuine underlying demand but warned the progress could falter if power capacity is not expanded swiftly. He remarked, ‘‘We cannot energize the data centers we will need … if we don’t speed up the buildout of energy and remove the mass of regulation that slows ‘breaking ground.’’’
While nuclear power remains the cornerstone of Burry’s proposed solution, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., has recently projected a rapid ascent of solar energy as the dominant electricity source in the future. Musk’s outlook follows data showing solar energy’s climbing share of new generation capacity. Nonetheless, major tech companies such as Meta Platforms, Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc. are already facing increasingly tight electricity constraints as next-generation AI data centers draw record power loads.
Electricity demand in the United States is anticipated to rise approximately 2.6% annually through 2030, a rate significantly higher than long-term historical trends, driven largely by the proliferation of AI data centers and advanced manufacturing sites. This growth trajectory places considerable strain on existing power infrastructure.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently cautioned that the escalating power demand could cause electricity prices to potentially double within the next five years if infrastructure development fails to keep pace. Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang has also remarked that the sustained growth of AI depends less on semiconductor chip availability and more acutely on sufficient access to electricity.
Collectively, these perspectives spotlight the critical intersection between energy capacity and AI, suggesting that the trajectory of U.S. technological leadership and economic resilience will increasingly depend on large-scale, rapid investments in power generation and grid modernization.