Baltimore, MD, Oct. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Not long ago, America was shutting nuclear plants down. Now Washington is lending billions to squeeze more power out of them.
The Energy Department has offered up to $4.2 billion to upgrade three Vistra reactors: Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania, and Davis-Besse and Perry in Ohio. The work adds 433 megawatts of new power and keeps nearly 4 gigawatts running.
“These investments will extend the life of existing reactors, increase nuclear generation,” said Gregory Beard, who leads the department’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
Big Tech has been racing toward nuclear too. In a new free presentation, tech analyst James Altucher points to Amazon throwing $20 billion at power, including nuclear, and Microsoft trying to revive an old nuclear program. But Altucher argues Elon Musk is chasing something bigger: power drawn straight from “the most energy dense object in our universe. The sun.”
AI Needs Power That Never Sleeps
For decades, tech companies never had to think like power companies. AI changed that.
AI runs on huge banks of computers. And those computers need power every hour of every day. Not just when the sun is out. Not just when the wind blows.
That’s why nuclear is suddenly in demand again. Vistra has signed long-term power deals with Amazon and Meta. Across the industry, tech giants and utilities are hunting for power that never shuts off.
The intelligence may be digital. But the fight to build it is a fight over physical power.
Everyone Is Scrambling for Electricity
Nuclear. Gas. Solar. Batteries. Grid upgrades. They’re all part of the scramble now.
Locking down power used to be a line item on a budget. Now it’s the whole strategy.
Altucher says every major tech player knows where the answer is. “But they can’t get there,” he says. “And they can’t do what Elon is doing.”
Musk’s Answer Isn’t Another Power Plant
Instead of bolting more reactors and power lines onto the grid, Altucher says Musk is taking AI to orbit, where the sun never sets on his satellites. “No clouds. No weather. No night,” Altucher says. “Just uninterrupted sunlight, more than 99% of the time.”
That, he says, means data centers that “run 24/7… Without problems with the grid.”
He points to a SpaceX filing with the FCC that he says shows the scale of Musk’s plan.
It won’t be easy. Running data centers in space comes with brutal technical and money problems. But Musk, Altucher says, already owns what everyone else would have to buy: the rockets and the satellites.
The harder everyone works to grab power on the ground, the easier it is to see why someone would go looking for it off the planet.
What Altucher Says Musk Still Needs
His presentation, in the end, is about what this new world will need.
Musk has built most of the pieces himself, Altucher says. But not all of them. He compares Musk’s AI chips to a brain, then asks: “But what good is a brain on its own, without a body?”
The missing piece, Altucher says, is the “nervous system” that moves data from satellites back to Earth. And he says it comes from a small outside supplier that hardly anyone knows about.
Nuclear and orbit aren’t the same answer. But they’re answers to the same question: how do you feed a machine that never stops eating?
About This Presentation
Most people see Elon Musk’s companies one at a time. James Altucher sees one machine. In this free presentation, he connects SpaceX, satellites, AI and chips into a single strategy, walks viewers through the filing he calls the proof and reveals the supplier he believes sits at a key choke point. It’s free to watch, anytime. Start here.
About James Altucher
James Altucher built his name on tech calls so early that most people thought he was crazy. As a former hedge fund manager, he spent years making real-money decisions in real markets. His early calls on NVIDIA and SpaceX came long before those names were mainstream. He has shared his views on CNBC and Fox Business and in The Wall Street Journal.
