In today’s issue:

  • 175 coal plants brought back to life
  • Zuck’s scaling AI to infinity
  • They don’t know…

Editor’s note: Today, we bring you a guest piece by Sam Volkering from his publication AI Collision which was first published on Tuesday 1 October.

You can hear from Sam more often at AI Collision and learn more about the latest developments in AI by simply clicking here to sign up for free.

Over here Sam is also providing the lowdown on the future for business and jobs in the age of AI – while it may not be pretty, and even a little scary, you can’t pretend AI is not about to upend businesses and jobs. That’s why he wants to help you understand and navigate this dramatic shift. He explains more here.

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

Last week I wrote about the grand plans for Constellation Energy and Microsoft to reboot the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor.

The same Three Mile Island that suffered a partial meltdown of their number two reactor in 1979. Good news is that reactor is staying shut. Microsoft and Constellation only plan to reboot the number one reactor that is perfectly operationally fine.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says they’re yet to actually get the application from Constellation for approval to get this done, but no doubt it’s certainly on the way.

What the NRC does have in front of it right now is an application for the rebooting of the Palisades nuclear reactor that had been slated for decommissioning. The approval for Palisades is expected soon – we don’t know exactly when, but we do know the expectation is Palisades will come back online in the fourth quarter of 2025. That means NRC approval is very likely to come before then.

If it does (which many expect is a slam dunk now) Palisades will be the first US nuclear reactor brought back from the brink.

Microsoft and Constellation will be the second. And thanks to legislation called the ADVANCE Act, signed into law by US President Joe Biden this year, it’s expected more and more reactors will be approved, old ones brought back to life and the progression of SMR technology accelerated.

But what a lot of people forget is that to accelerate the rollout of nuclear, you need space and a whole lot of infrastructure.

That doesn’t magically appear in an instant… unless you’ve already got it ready made.

According to CNBC,

Coal communities across the U.S. could provide a runway to build out a large number of new nuclear plants. Utilities in many parts of the U.S. are phasing out coal as part of the clean energy transition, creating a supply gap in some regions because new generation is not being built fast enough.

Recently shuttered coal plants, those expected to retire, and currently operating plants with no estimated shutdown date yet could provide space for up to 174 gigawatts of new nuclear power across 36 states, according to a Department of Energy study published earlier this month.

Adding to this, Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy, said,

“Coal plants already have transmission lines in place, allowing reactors at those sites to avoid the long process of siting new grid connections,

“The plants also have people experienced in the energy industry who could transition to working at a nuclear facility,

“We can actually get a significant cost reduction by building at a coal plant,

“We can maybe get a 30% cost reduction compared to just going on a greenfield site.”

This is not a new idea to us at AI Collision though.

In late 2023, we released an investment briefing outlining the enormity of the nuclear opportunity. In that briefing we covered a range of key catalysts and opportunities that were coming thanks to nuclear.

These opportunities still exist, but in that briefing we said something that I don’t think people switched on to properly at the time. It was this idea that we could use old, decommissioned coal plants to put nuclear energy.

We said:

Where the vast majority of reactors currently in existence are built from scratch. This reactor is mass produced, stamped out on a production line. That means not only is this reactor 1/50th of the cost of a legacy reactor. It takes 1/5th of the time to manufacture. And just 72 hours to construct. As a result, this new type of nuclear reactor is capable of powering,

Hospitals…

Universities…

Data centres…

Business parks…

Industrial estates.

And it can also be retrofitted inside every one of the UK’s 175 shuttered coal plants. Thereby giving them the ability to power every town and city in the UK.

Data centres, nuclear reactors, inside shuttered coal plants. We said this around a year ago. And only now are you starting to see this kind of idea spring into the mainstream.

Again, this isn’t new to us, the need for nuclear is clear. The ability to lean on existing fossil fuel infrastructure is obvious. The demand is also very clear, even to the biggest names in tech.

Just this last week Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was saying that nuclear is clearly a part of our clean energy future.

Source: Bloomberg

As per the article,

“Nuclear is wonderful as one of the sources of energy, one of the sources of sustainable energy,” Huang said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It won’t be the only one. We’re going to need energy from all sources and balance the availability and the cost of energy as well as the sustainability over time.”

Watch this space. While there’s no doubt new nuclear tech is going to hit the energy markets in a big way, don’t forget the potential of programmes like Palisades, Three Mile Island and the ability to use existing infrastructure like coal plants to get the job done.

And if you’re seeing it happen now in the US, it’s only a matter of time until the UK starts to wake up to this potential too.

PS The reason we’re even talking about rebooting old coal mines, and chucking nuclear energy in there is because of AI. AI is everywhere. The demand for more power, more energy, more everything is real. That’s a full-blown AI boom. But you also have to realise AI is going to force thousands of businesses… and even entire industries… to undergo a sea change or fade away. That’s why I want to put you on the winning side of the AI mega trend. Find out more here.

AI gone wild 🤪

Nvidia to infinity.

Sounds ridiculous I know. But what if there is no ceiling as to how high its stock price can go? What if it’s one of those stocks that even now as one of the biggest companies in the world you buy and hold for 500 years?

Well clearly none of us live to 500. But it’s the kind of stock that you buy, hold, pass on to the next generation, who holds, then passes on to the next generation and so on.

The kind of stock that feeds generations of family so to speak.

There aren’t many companies that can provide that long term. Perhaps Nvidia is one?

How can we say that with any form of confidence though? Well, when it comes to AI, there’s an insatiable thirst for more and more high-powered GPUs. These are the heartbeat of AI as we know it (for now).

Now you might think there’s a ceiling to the demand for these as AI scales up and then reaches a point where the chips just get efficient and fast enough without needed to overhaul systems.

However, check out the two minutes with Mark Zuckerberg here. Maybe there is no ceiling. Maybe AI scaling is infinite. If it is, then maybe the potential for Nvidia is infinite too. (And maybe that of a British company too – whose technology Nvidia is reliant on. I call it “the invisible hand of AI”. It’s worth finding out more about that over here.)

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week.) [Figures correct at time of writing.]

Boom 📈

  • iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) up 18%
  • Brainchip (ASX:BRN) up 18%
  • Micron (NASDAQ:MU) up 18%

Bust 📉

  • Wearable Devices (NASDAQ:WLDS) down 8%
  • Cyient (NSE:CYIENT) down 8%
  • Appen (ASX:APX) down 6%

From the hive mind 🧠

  • A data centre here, a data centre there, a little data centre for you, one for you, one for you… If you’re not living within about a mile of a data centre these days, you will be bloody soon! In the US they’re springing up everywhere and Google is about to build two more for a cool $3.3 billion.
  • I’ve noticed that in every Zoom call I do these days, there’s a person that traditionally was never there. But now they’re very punctual, never speaking, but always listening. It’s an AI companion that records our meeting notes and summarises them for us. It’s the kind of AI that creeps into everyday life. And even into the kinds of jobs where you might not think AI would wriggle its way into.
  • Regulation and AI, these are two things that are going to find themselves inseparable for the foreseeable future. Where there is innovation, growth, opportunity, then regulation will come. But not if Gavin Newsom has his way… this really is an interesting development in the US on regulation (and kind of works with the image you’ll find later on…).

Weirdest AI image of the day

So, this one isn’t our usual AI-generated image that we find on Weirddalle Reddit thread, instead it was something we saw on X.com and thought it was hilarious!

Source: des (@dotnetschizo) via X.com

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

“Innovation happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.” – Jonathan Ive, 2006

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief, AI Collision

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