New York Is Building a New Advanced Nuclear Power Plant to Supply a Million New Homes... or One Artificial Intelligence Data Center

America is making nuclear great again...

Soon, somewhere amid the apple orchards that edge Lake Ontario in New York will be the nation's first advanced nuclear-power facility.

Today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced she has directed the New York Power Authority to identify a site in upstate New York to host a new nuclear plant capable of producing 1 gigawatt of electricity.

That's enough to power roughly 1 million homes... or one next-generation artificial intelligence ("AI") data center.

It all comes after President Donald Trump signed executive orders aimed at rapidly expanding American nuclear capabilities.

The administration's stated goals are to quadruple domestic nuclear output by 2050... largely by speeding up regulatory bottlenecks from America's notoriously cautious Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("NRC").

Governor Hochul is capitalizing on that federal momentum to hopefully dodge the decade-long permitting slog that sank earlier nuclear plans. In the Wall Street Journal, Hochul framed the new plant's necessity in plain language: reliability, affordability, and a welcome mat for manufacturers and data-center operators that are flocking to the state – provided New York can power their energy-hungry servers.

And she wants shovels in the ground fast, with one of two approaches...

• One path calls for a single large, pressurized water reactor built on a brownfield next to one of Constellation Energy's three existing plants in New York so it can tap established cooling water and grid hookups.
• The other option embraces small modular reactors – cookie-cutter units forged in factories and shipped up the Thruway like oversized Lego bricks – an idea Ontario is already testing just over the border.

This announcement landed in the middle of the buzz around Whitney Tilson's new prediction about the "Amazon Helios" project.

In the widely circulated Stansberry Research documentary (you can watch it here), Tilson argues that Jeff Bezos and a host of Silicon Valley billionaires are funneling cash into nuclear fusion startups because artificial intelligence servers will soon demand "near limitless" electricity.

And the new nuclear fission plant in the state of New York is a step in the right direction.

After all, while fusion may still be some years away, the motivations behind Helios echo throughout Hochul's fission deal. The biggest tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all racing to expand their data-center footprints across the Northeast.

Every new cluster of graphics processors needs power that is steady, cheap, and free of carbon offsets. Wind and solar alone cannot deliver that around the clock, and new natural gas plants run head-on into New York's strict emissions law. A modern nuclear plant – fission today, fusion tomorrow – offers a "stepping stone" for those power-hungry firms.

Already, tech giants are signing fission power purchase agreements out to 2040 and beyond. Those contracts create predictable revenue streams that make new nuclear financeable with private capital. They also build a lobby that will push federal regulators to keep the accelerator down on both fission and fusion.

In Tilson's telling, AI needs fusion to thrive... and fusion needs AI-driven simulations to hit ignition goals.

Watch the timing here closely... Trump's executive orders give the NRC until November 2026 to publish new licensing guidelines. And Hochul's task force intends to choose a reactor design soon after.

The bottom line is that America's return to nuclear greatness is well on its way – thanks to AI's endless energy appetite and a bipartisan realization that wind and solar aren't enough.