The U.S. government is formulating ambitious plans to fuel its effort to win the global artificial intelligence arms race.
The plans are under construction across the country this week, from top research officials gathering near Washington to foreign government and business leaders meeting with Trump administration officials, to the state legislature of Texas.
At the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, Energy Secretary Chris Wright compared the importance of the “AI arms race” to the push for atomic weapons to end World War II.
Mr. Wright told the gathering of investors, scientists, and government officials that nuclear weapons helped secure a relative peace that made the Cold War less deadly than it had the potential to be. He said winning the AI race now would be key to keeping the relative peace for the future.
“It’s critical that the United States is the leading nation in AI, and to do that we have to be the leading nation in growing our energy supply,” Mr. Wright said. “AI is just an energy-intensive manufacturing industry. It takes the highest form and the most expensive form of energy, electricity, and turns it into intelligence.”
Mr. Wright said Monday he hated calling the competition an “AI arms race,” as he sees the potential for AI to advance drug discovery and the sciences for all nations, but he acknowledged AI had huge applications for national security — both offensive and defensive.
To fund energy projects that make risk-averse investors and researchers blanch, the Department of Energy turns to its Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy. Modeled after the Pentagon’s research and development unit, “ARPA-E” aims to turn “outlier ideas” into major shifts for the energy industry.
Since its launch a little more than 15 years ago, the agency has spent $4.2 billion on more than 1,700 projects as of February 2025, according to ARPA-E Acting Director Daniel Cunningham.
“ARPA-E goes where others cannot and will not,” Mr. Cunningham said at the conference. “We fund, test, [and] accelerate technologies from concept to prototype to commercialization, enabling America’s most promising energy advancements to reach scale.”
ARPA-E’s projects have included such things as its “GEMINA” program completed in 2023 to create AI-enabled predictive maintenance digital twins for advanced nuclear reactors. The program worked to build an AI system for continuous monitoring and early warning of issues with the nuclear reactors.
In 2025, much of the energy industry’s attention — and that of the ARPA-E conference-goers — is fixed on nuclear power, particularly to buoy the artificial intelligence overhaul worldwide.
Last week, Amazon, Google and Meta joined a pledge organized by the World Nuclear Association to support the tripling of nuclear energy capacity globally in the next 25 years.
Amazon purchased a nuclear-powered data center last year, Google is working with Kairos Power to build a U.S. fleet of advanced nuclear power projects by 2035, and Meta said in December it was requesting proposals from nuclear energy developers to help meet its energy-thirsty AI objectives.
Several other technology companies say they are eager to tap nuclear power’s potential as well, and American policymakers are taking notice.
The Texas House of Representatives Committee on State Affairs is meeting this week to discuss a bill to promote the development of nuclear reactors in the Lone Star State. House Bill 14 aims to expand a Texas Advanced Nuclear Deployment Office to lure nuclear power projects with an estimated price tag of $2 billion from Texas taxpayers, according to reports.
Nuclear Energy Institute Senior Vice President John Kotek said at the ARPA-E summit that he was heading straight to Texas later this week to testify on the state’s new nuclear power plans.
Mr. Kotek told the ARPA-E summit attendees that other states were interested in encouraging new nuclear power projects too, and to expect more action at the state and federal levels.
“If we can get the first handful of these projects underway, I think that’s going to unleash just a whole wave, a second large wave of nuclear construction here in the U.S.,” he said. “And I didn’t even [touch] on international. The international market is potentially huge.”
The Trump administration is aware of the global market for nuclear energy to power AI and U.S. officials are meeting this week with its counterparts from the United Arab Emirates, according to Vice President J.D. Vance.
Mr. Vance told the American Dynamism Summit in Washington on Tuesday that developing energy for AI is something capturing the focus of many of his foreign counterparts.
“We’re thrilled to have our friends from the United Arab Emirates, a number of the business leaders and government leaders, in town this week for meetings with our government,” Mr. Vance said at the summit. “And one of the things they consistently hammer upon — it’s something that unfortunately too few of our European allies tend to get — is that if you want to lead in artificial intelligence, you have got to be leading in energy production.”
Mr. Vance told the summit America would “set the pace” and lead from the front on energy to power AI.
