It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

Van Buren County is a rural redoubt in southwestern Michigan, a quiet corner of a swing state. Pillow soft sand dunes shift and shape along the shores of Lake Michigan. And the county seat – Paw Paw – is named after a quintessentially Midwestern fruit.

“It is a beautiful natural environment with gorgeous sand dunes that you don’t see in other parts of the world,” says Daywi Cook, whose family has lived in this area for five generations. “A lot of folks like to live here because of the solitude.”

Covert Township’s tranquility seems to belie its place as the vanguard to a potential nuclear transformation. The Van Buren County township has been home to the Palisades Nuclear Plant since 1971. The aging plant was decommissioned in 2022 but is being brought back into service through an over $1 billion loan secured under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, with the first installment provided by the federal government this year. In addition to reactivating the plant, the site is also expected to house the nation’s first small modular reactors (SMRs).

Small modular reactors are factory-built nuclear power plants that are much smaller than traditional reactors (typically 300 megawatts or less). The SMRs are usually designed to be mass-produced and shipped to sites for faster, less costly installation.

The future of energy in the U.S. may be unfolding in this unassuming corner of Michigan where the Holtec Corporation is constructing two SMR-300 units which will be co-located with the existing 800-megawatt Palisades plant. The SMRs are planned to be operational by the early 2030s.

“There are still some unknowns but Holtec has been inviting us into the conversation,” said Cook, who is the township supervisor. She says the area’s familiarity with nuclear energy and the plant’s safety record has gone a long way to assuage the county’s residents.

Holtec did not respond to a request for comment.

Cook is hoping the recommissioned legacy plant and the SMRs will give the county some needed economic stability which is guided largely by seasonal swings.

“We are known as the Catskills of Chicago. There are a lot of short-term rentals that boom in the summer,” Cook said, which she explained then sit empty in the winter. “It would be nice to have year-round stability,” Cook added.

Zach Morris, executive director of Market One, a local association of business and government leaders that promotes economic growth in Cass and Van Buren Counties, Michigan, says that the area is uniquely positioned to be the leading edge of the nation’s nuclear renaissance. Because of the existing plant, the nuclear knowledge is ready and in the workforce, and the area has ample power to make power.

Morris says the recommissioned legacy nuclear plant will employ 600 people, and the two SMRs will employ a combined 300 people with salaries averaging $107,000. “That is $32 million in payroll annually, resulting in significant money being spent in groceries, restaurants, and donations to non-profits,” Morris said. And with the area’s nuclear past, there’s been little opposition to the arrival of SMRs, which he pointed out have been around for awhile, used in the military for years in submarines and aircraft carriers. “This is not a new technology, but there has not been a need for it until now,” Morris said.

A Holtec SMR will provide enough power for 300,000 homes or a data center or two, a drop-in-the-bucket in the sating of demand.

“We have a national issue, it is a national crisis that we didn’t anticipate five years ago,” Morris said. “Five years ago nobody saw this coming. Their collective genius didn’t anticipate this,” he said of data centers coming online without enough power and people who don’t want to give up their AI, streaming services, or cameras. “That means we have to adapt to the crisis. SMRs are the future,” Morris said.

To illustrate how much the world of power generation has been upended in short order, Morris offers a stark comparison. “Five years ago we were worried about how we were going to put up with the demand from a 20 megawatt marijuana farm,” he said, referring to a planned cannabis operation, and adding, “that is a fraction of what the data centers are asking for.”

Big Tech’s role in nuclear comeback

People are using AI for everything from identifying the animal tracks in their backyard to analyzing 10 years of sales data for corporate reports. And this torrent of requests for AI is leading to a torrent of demand for data centers to do the complex computing needed for instant answers. And the demand for data centers — constructed by tech titans Google, Amazon, and others — has led to a torrent of demand for electricity.

While the industry works on smaller, scalable nuclear solutions, big tech is taking decommissioned legacy plants out of mothballs. Constellation Energy plans to restart the 835-MW Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear generating station in Pennsylvania in 2028, with Microsoft agreeing to buy electricity from the reactivated power plant to power their data centers. And Google recently entered into an agreement with Kairos Power and the TVA for a new nuclear plant.

Bill Gates has been among the tech titans leading the charge, investing $1 billion in the technology and co-founding TerraPower, which is building a next generation nuclear plant in Wyoming. Gate’s company also announced plans recently to explore building a nuclear facility in Kansas.

“Both fission and fusion are fundamental technologies for humanity to power everything we do. We’re on the cusp of massive breakthroughs, and it’s clearer now than even before: The future of energy is subatomic,” Gates wrote in Power Magazine this week.

Oklo, which OpenAI’s Sam Altman helped to take public before stepping back from his role as chairman in April, remains a highly speculative public stock market play on the nuclear potential, with no revenue or power purchase agreements, and is at least several years away from commercial operations. But its shares have boomed since its 2024 IPO.

Insurance industry rates risk as low

Much of the industry excitement surrounds SMRs and their commercial deployment.

Everett Hansen, vice-president of energy and power for Marsh, a leading insurance broker that helps businesses manage risk and secure coverage, sees nuclear, whether it is an SMR or a legacy system, as a safe bet.

“Nuclear power plants are probably the best engineered,” Hansen said, when comparing to other power sources. “Their design is incredibly thorough and detailed,” he added.

Hansen says that part of the design process is exhaustive loss modeling and casualty analysis. Casualty in the industry parlance refers to an “incident,” and in the analysis a casualty could be something minor to very severe.

Hansen says that when it comes to nuclear, people’s reaction is to think of it on its worst day. Think Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island. But nuclear has come a long way.

“They are very well-studied. There are not many things that could happen in a nuclear plant which are unknown or haven’t been looked at,” Hansen said. “The effective management of physical hazards, financial risks, strategy risks, all of that materially contributes to the commercial pathways being viable,” Hansen said, describing himself as “optimistic” about the SMRs’ viability.

There is the expense of deploying SMRs, but Hansen thinks that, too, will be overcome.

“The assets are very expensive to construct, and SMRs are trying to get at that problem by reducing product capex. But being the first of a kind nature, the risk is economic,” Hansen said. Costs should come down over time after the first builds as developers act on plans to scale the business model.

“Collectively we will all be surprised a year or a few years from now with respect to what has changed. There will be a shift and things will happen,” he added.

Differing views on 2030s timeline for widespread deployment

Still, opinions vary about how ready SMRs are for prime time.

Whit Johnson, a Salt Lake City-based partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, who counsels a portfolio of tech clients, agrees that the specter of nuclear disasters haunt to this day, but the industry has seen many changes since then.

“Nuclear power is not what it was nearly 40 years ago when the Chernobyl meltdown created fear for many about nuclear power. The technology has come a long, long way,” Johnson said, comparing today’s nuclear with dial-up internet vs. cloud computing. “Still, there remains in the public perception a lingering stigma about nuclear power, but it may be time to create an opportunity for society to rethink nuclear,” Johnson said.

“While SMRs clearly offer potential, their viability remains largely based on projections, not operational evidence,” said Gilbert Michaud, assistant professor of environmental policy at the School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago, and Coordinator of the School’s “Climate & Energy” Focus Area.

While Hansen said regulators in the U.S. are another reason to be confident in the nuclear revival, Michaud says the existing regulatory framework hasn’t yet caught up with the planned deployment of SMRs. “The regulatory framework for nuclear is based on large reactors, and adapting rules for SMRs remains a work in progress,” he said.

Before widespread deployment of SMRs, Michaud said more planning and preparation protocols are needed. “Deploying these in or near populated areas necessitates the need for better emergency preparedness and better public trust,” he said, with fuel handling and storage, and mitigating cyber threats among issues that require better testing and better data.

That leads him to believe widespread deployment of SMRs will take longer than the most optimistic forecasts.

“I don’t think that SMRs will be that common over the next 5-10 years. While there is obvious potential, there are still major regulatory, cost, timeline, and community acceptance challenges. Widespread commercial rollout may be slow,” Michaud said.

Even by the 2030s, SMRs are likely to be pilot projects at industrial sites and not tucked away in a strip mall or subdivision, according to Michaud, with costs, financing challenges and maintaining an adequate supply chain among key obstacles.

“SMRs are newer and have seen major cost overruns and delays. Because they are unproven at scale, projects are likely to go over budget, and these dollars could have been invested in proven technologies like wind, solar, and storage. This provides risk to energy developers, utilities, and even ratepayers,” Michaud says.

An SMR planned in Idaho last year was cancelled due to multiple factors, including cost overruns.

The Palisades plant in Michigan, meanwhile, needs major repairs to restart safely, according to regulatory filing made by Holtec.

But public opinion is shifting. A Pew poll from last August found a majority of Americans (56%) in support of more nuclear power for electricity generation. That was unchanged year over year, and Pew noted that Americans remain more likely to favor expanding solar power and wind power. But the public support for nuclear has increased from 43% a decade ago, while overall support for solar and wind power has declined by double digits in recent years, according to Pew, as more Republicans voice support for nuclear power.

In Covert Township, Cook says the future is nuclear, and the focus for now is primarily on getting the legacy plant back up and running and then she thinks people will pay more attention to the SMRs.

“With SMRs you will get more skepticism because it is newer technology and there will be questions,” Cook said.