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Nuclear Is the Most Important Energy Trade Right Now

Something structural is happening in the energy market. It doesn’t have the drama of an earnings miss or a CEO blowup. It’s quieter than that. But it may be one of the most durable multi-year opportunities in the market right now – and most retail investors are still buying the wrong names.

AI data centers are consuming electricity at a pace the existing U.S. grid simply cannot absorb. According to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report, U.S. data center electricity demand is projected to climb to 35 gigawatts by 2030, up from roughly 19 GW in 2023 – and more aggressive estimates from BloombergNEF put the figure closer to 106 GW by 2035. Every time someone runs an AI query, it uses roughly 10 times more electricity than a traditional internet search, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Multiply that by billions of daily queries and you have a power problem hiding in plain sight.

Wind and solar can’t solve it – they’re intermittent. Natural gas helps near-term but carries fuel-cost volatility and emissions commitments most hyperscalers don’t want. Nuclear delivers dense, reliable, carbon-free baseload power at industrial scale, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That’s exactly what a data center needs.

The market figured this out fast. GE Vernova is up more than 75% year-to-date through late April 2026. Meanwhile the S&P 500 is roughly flat over the same stretch. That gap is not noise.

The players

Constellation Energy (CEG) is the clearest pure-play. It operates the largest nuclear fleet in the U.S. – 21 reactors across 16 facilities – and completed its acquisition of Calpine in January 2026, a deal with an equity price of $16.4 billion and a total enterprise value of approximately $26.6 billion, making it the largest private-sector power producer in the world. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $11.1 billion, largely driven by the Calpine consolidation. Adjusted EPS was $2.74 per share, up $0.60 from the prior-year period, beating expectations. Management reaffirmed full-year 2026 adjusted EPS guidance of $11 to $12 per share, with CEO Joe Dominguez stating that base earnings growth “exceeds 20% through 2029.” Free cash flow is guided at $8.4 billion across 2026–2027, rising to $11.5 to $13 billion in 2028–2029. Microsoft and Meta have each signed 20-year nuclear power purchase agreements with CEG – Microsoft to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center (formerly Three Mile Island) in Pennsylvania, Meta to take output from the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois. The stock is down roughly 14% year-to-date, trading at a forward P/E of approximately 39x – not cheap, but not absurd for what is now effectively an AI infrastructure company wearing a utility badge.

Slight tangent, but it matters: the Calpine deal didn’t just add natural gas megawatts. It brought the largest geothermal operation in the U.S. – The Geysers in California. That’s another form of firm, carbon-free baseload power most investors aren’t accounting for in the valuation.

Cameco (CCJ) is the uranium angle. The Canadian miner is one of the world’s largest uranium producers and holds roughly 230 million pounds under long-term contracts, with deliveries averaging about 28 million pounds per year from 2026 through 2030. Uranium futures have been trading near $86 per pound, with TradeTech’s long-term price indicator marked at $93 as of March 2026. Cameco recently signed a $2.6 billion long-term supply deal with India’s Department of Atomic Energy covering nearly 22 million pounds of uranium through 2035. Supply takes years to scale. That structural tightness is a tailwind for both price and margins, though it’s worth noting Cameco’s long-term contract portfolio caps near-term realized prices – 2026 average realized price guidance sits at roughly CAD 85–89 per pound.

GE Vernova (GEV) brings the small modular reactor angle. Its GE Hitachi unit is developing the BWRX-300, a 300-megawatt factory-built reactor currently under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada – the first SMR under construction in North America, targeting commercial operation by the end of 2030. The U.S. and Japanese governments announced up to $40 billion in support for GE Vernova Hitachi to deploy BWRX-300 reactors in Tennessee and Alabama. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $9.34 billion, beating consensus, with adjusted EBITDA up 87% year-over-year. The stock has climbed more than 75% in 2026 alone and now trades at roughly 40x NTM EV/EBITDA – premium valuation, premium expectations.

The part people skip

In May 2025, President Trump signed four executive orders targeting an expansion of U.S. nuclear capacity from roughly 100 GW today to 400 GW by 2050 – a quadrupling. The orders mandate faster NRC licensing timelines, direct the DOE to prioritize nuclear loan programs, and explicitly link nuclear expansion to AI data center power needs. The IEA’s World Energy Outlook projects that achieving the global pledge to triple nuclear capacity would require annual investment to rise from roughly $70 billion today to approximately $210 billion around 2035. Separately, the U.S. government announced a $2.7 billion investment to strengthen domestic uranium enrichment, and up to $80 billion in support for new nuclear reactor deployment. Policy, capital, and corporate demand are all pointing the same direction at the same time.

That rarely happens.

The risks are real: uranium price volatility, grid transmission constraints, SMR construction timelines and cost overruns, regulatory complexity, and the premium already priced into several names. CEG is not a screaming value at current levels. GEV is trading at a multiple that assumes near-flawless execution through 2028. And the 400 GW federal target by 2050 would require a pace of construction the U.S. has not seen since the 1960s – worth keeping in mind before treating executive orders as guaranteed outcomes.

The question isn’t whether nuclear matters to the next decade of AI infrastructure. It’s whether you own the right piece of it – and whether you understand what you’re actually paying for.