And as AI accounts for a rapidly increasing share of domestic energy consumption, average American households are seeing their monthly prices shoot through the roof. Bloomberg reported in late September that electricity costs in areas housing “significant data center activity” rose nearly 270% compared to five years prior, while electricity costs for portions of the East Coast have jumped around 80% since 2024.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Washington Examiner earlier this week that rising costs are a “binding constraint” of Trump’s AI boom, but suggested that executive actions Trump has taken in hopes of meeting AI’s growing energy demands will, in theory, lower costs for consumers.

In particular, Bessent pointed to an order Trump signed in July opening up “federally owned land and resources” for the construction of both new data centers and energy projects that can fuel them, specifically nuclear buildouts.

“The president is giving companies the ability to build their own power source,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We’re talking about putting nuclear power on federal land to expedite the process.”

However, multiple nuclear power insiders and energy policy experts tell the Washington Examiner that while a potentially viable long-term solution, Bessent’s proposed fixes won’t make a difference in the short term.

“I wouldn’t necessarily point to small modular reactors or fusion as being the solution to increasing electric rates right now, It’s just that the time horizon is too long and there’s too much uncertainty,” one insider, a former senior congressional staffer focused on energy policy, explained. “Nuclear is not going to ride in and save the day in the next six months to a year. That’s not a viable timeline.”

That person suggested that, given current electricity rates, projected AI growth, and the up to two-decade-long construction timetables for new nuclear reactors, consumers could expect to see monthly savings electricity savings an “early 2030’s timeline, rather than something that’s near at hand.”

A veteran Republican energy lobbyist with close ties to the nuclear industry pointedly referred to Bessent’s Wednesday comments as “MAGA nonsense.”

“It’s a clusterf***,” that person assessed. “It takes like 20 years to build a new reactor, and ratepayers are currently getting f*****, which everyone knew was going to happen.”

Two other Republican energy lobbyists specifically told the Washington Examiner that the Trump administration’s general attitude on renewable energy is also likely contributing to AI-driven rate increases.

While Trump’s July order opened up federal lands to natural gas, coal, and geothermal power projects, in addition to nuclear, the administration has directly attacked hydropower and wind and solar energy, all of which those lobbyists say can be used to ease AI-driven energy demand.

Chuka Umunna, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s global head of sustainable solutions, made similar comments during a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg Television, stating that “it’s difficult to conceive of a situation in which they won’t need to tap into those sources of energy” to offset data center consumption.

“We need more energy from all sources,” to lower costs for American households, he concluded.

Due to the government shutdown, the Trump administration did not release its Consumer Price Index report for September as scheduled on Wednesday morning, but the August CPI report showed energy prices up 0.2% compared to last year. The more than 6% increase in electricity costs across that same window was more than double the inflation rate for the year ending in August.

White House officials defended the president’s dismantling of former President Joe Biden’s “Green New Scam of massive government handouts for wind and solar,” insisting that “the only viable way” to meet AI energy demands was to “unlock the potential of U.S. natural gas, coal, and establish robust nuclear power to grow our grid.”

“It was Joe Biden’s radical climate agenda and destructive energy policies that drove energy prices up. President Trump’s actions to unleash American energy are the only reason our country has not experienced blackouts and grid failures that would have occurred if the Green New Scam was still the law of the land,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers wrote in a statement. “On day one, he declared an energy emergency to reverse four years of Biden’s policies that drove up energy prices for working families and expedited the expansion of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power generation.”

Energy and electricity demand has soared over the last year and is only expected to jump even higher as the U.S. aims to get ahead of China in the race for AI. 

AI and large load facilities like data centers are highly energy intensive, and have been directly linked to soaring electricity demand seen within the last year. As the U.S. aims to get ahead of China in the race for AI, demand is only expected to soar in the next five years. 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has forecast that by 2030, AI data centers in the U.S. will consume nearly 84 gigawatts. Last year, these facilities only consumed around 4 gigawatts.

Nuclear power does provide an attractive option for both the administration and private sector in securing reliable energy, as the technology has a capacity favor of around 92.3%, higher than any other energy source. This means nuclear power plants can produce reliable and secure electricity more than 92% of the time — and do so with a condensed footprint compared to other non-fossil fuel sources of energy.

Private investments in nuclear energy have also soared within the last year, with major tech companies including Google, Meta, and Amazon racing to secure enough power for their AI advancements. 

Some companies, like Microsoft, have looked to revive retired nuclear power plants, though most are pursuing new advanced nuclear energy through small modular reactors. Small modular reactors are known for having a smaller footprint than traditional large facilities, making it easier to build them closer to the local grid – or even data centers themselves. 

Typically, these reactors can generate upward of 300 megawatts of power, but there are currently no SMRs operational in the U.S. and only three operations worldwide. 

Still, many within the nuclear energy industry are hopeful that utilizing federal and public lands would accelerate the buildout of new reactors by reducing delays often encountered throughout the state and federal permitting process. 

“There are many points that nuclear power projects need to be permitted, and any one of them could be the cause of a delay,” Adam Stein, the head of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, told the Washington Examiner. 

By building on federal land, Stein said, developers are then able to circumvent some of the local permitting requirements that would otherwise be required on private land. 

The Department of Energy has already taken steps to use federal sites to advance nuclear reactor development through its pilot reactor program. In August, the agency selected 10 companies and 11 projects to participate in this program, focused solely on building small test reactors within the next year. 

The program aims to have at least three small test reactors built and hit criticality status. Reaching criticality means that a reactor is perfectly stable and can produce power.

Each project is taking a slightly different approach, in terms of the fuel used, the size of the reactor, or the type of design for the reactor. Some are even being built on federal land. Aalo Atomics, one of the companies participating in the program, will be building its product – a 10 megawatt reactor – on land at the Idaho National Laboratory. 

By partnering with the Energy Department in this way, Aalo Atomics is hopeful it will be able to prove to federal regulators and the private sector that advanced nuclear energy can play a role in meeting short term energy demand. 

Aalo Atomics is also hoping to build a data center on the same site, using the energy generated by its SMR to power its operations. 

“We’re going to power an experimental data center, and we think it might be the world’s first co-located and cobuilt, nuclear powered data center,” Aalo Atomics CEO Matt Losak told the Washington Examiner in August. “It’s still a bit of an incremental step in this experimental direction, but it still proves something commercially, which could be deployed much more of thereafter.”

Under this approach, the Trump administration would likely stick to lands and sites managed by the Departments of Energy and War. 

As the executive order signed in July also directed the Department of Interior to identify potential sites for data center and energy development, there is the possibility that public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management could be leased to private companies. 

“The federal government owns large portions of the western states and private land is therefore in some areas at a premium, and access to federal land could make it much easier to build in those states,” Stein told the Washington Examiner. 

However, some industry experts are skeptical about developers wanting to pursue building on BLM managed land as many of these regions lack the right amount of water needed to support data center operations, or are so far from existing infrastructure that environmental reviews and permitting needed to build new transmission would only cause more bureaucratic red-tape. 

BESSENT: RISING POWER COSTS A ‘BINDING CONSTRAINT’ OF TRUMP AI BOOM

“There’s no one size fits all thing that the government or private sector can do to get nuclear moving forward,” Stein warned. “It’s a different case by case for every developer, every area, every market.”