Elon Musk Says SpaceX Needs More Power Than New York City in a Heatwave. These 2 Nuclear Stocks Should Benefit.

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) CEO Elon Musk is concerned with the supply of electricity in the U.S. Over the past three months, the space company has spent $15.8 billion scaling its artificial intelligence compute infrastructure -- infrastructure that is highly energy-intensive. During SpaceX's first earnings call on Aug. 11, Musk stressed the need to scale up its energy infrastructure in tandem.

"[O]ur tentative target is to actually have 20 gigawatts at the power and cooling level online by the end of next year," Elon Musk revealed. "Now I don't think we're going to achieve 20 gigawatts, but we want to have a series of projects that cumulatively come to 20 gigawatts by the end of next year. Some of them won't pan out exactly on time, but I would expect that we still probably have at the power plant level, something close to 15 gigawatts."

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For comparison, New York City requires roughly 10 gigawatts of power during a heatwave, putting SpaceX's near-term energy needs well beyond the largest city in the U.S.

Thus far, SpaceX has relied on a variety of renewable and conventional electricity sources to power its growing data center empire. More recently, it has leaned heavily on natural gas. But in the long term, new solutions that provide large amounts of reliable, low-carbon baseload power will be needed.

It's no wonder, then, that the CEO of OpenAI -- one of SpaceX's biggest competitors -- personally invested in a relatively new approach to nuclear energy. Fortunately for investors, there are two pure-play stocks betting on that exact thesis.

Nuclear energy is perfect for artificial intelligence

In general, nuclear energy is well-suited to meeting the rising energy needs of SpaceX and other AI companies.

"Unlike wind turbines and solar arrays that generate electricity intermittently, nuclear power plants typically put out a constant supply of energy to the grid, which aligns well with what data centers need," observes an industry report by the MIT Technology Review .

The main issue with nuclear is simply how long it takes to get a new plant online. "The problem is how to build up nuclear capacity -- existing facilities are limited, and new technologies will take time to build," the MIT Technology Review warns. "To meet electricity demand from data centers expected in 2030 with nuclear power, we'd need to expand the fleet of reactors in the country by half."