President Donald Trump offered Silicon Valley an extraordinary deal on Wednesday: Build your own nuclear power plants to fuel AI, and his administration will approve them in just three weeks.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump addressed a room of tech executives struggling with an aging U.S. electrical grid.
“I came up with the idea,” Trump said. “You people are brilliant. You have a lot of money. You can build your own electric generating plants.”
Trump talked for about 10 minutes about energy in his speech, making it clear Trump views a straining electric grid as a central economic risk of 2026. As artificial intelligence pushes electricity demand to record highs, the administration is framing power shortages as an existential threat to growth and national security. Slashing approval timelines, Trump argued, is a necessary response to an energy system he said he believes is fundamentally unprepared for the AI era.
“We needed more than double the energy currently in the country just to take care of the AI plants,” Trump said.
