Germany switched off its last three nuclear plants in April 2023. Sweden had already taken Barsebäck, Oskarshamn 1 and 2, and Ringhals 1 and 2 off the board. That is not a vibe. It is missing baseload in the part of the map where factories and, later, server halls actually sit. Nuclear is dull power: it runs at night, in January, and when the wind forgets its job. Take that out and the grid gets twitchy. Prices follow. Industry notices.

The bill showed up in the usual European way — late, then all at once. Germany’s day-ahead wholesale price averaged €78.51/MWh in 2024. In Texas, ERCOT real-time power sat closer to $30/MWh. Energy-heavy plants do not hold a seminar about that gap. They move, shrink, or stop. Meanwhile the same continent that could not keep a reactor online spent political capital on tethered plastic caps, mandatory on PET bottles up to three litres from 3 July 2024. Useful if you hate litter on beaches. Less useful if you want aluminium, chemicals, or a building full of GPUs.

History will not grade the press releases. It will grade the megawatts. The movements that treated working reactors as a moral stain, and called the result “transition,” will own the empty plots where the training clusters did not get built.

AI is an electricity story wearing a hoodie. Training clusters want cheap, boring megawatts at scale. The United States hosts on the order of three-quarters of global AI compute. Europe is around five percent. Data-center pipelines exist here — Ireland, the Nordics, France, Germany — but the units are smaller and a thinner share of them is used for training. That is what “virtually non-existent” should have said the first time: not zero halls, just not the halls that train the models everyone else then rents.

I have made the cheap joke before. EU invention: the cap that will not leave the bottle. American invention: a first stage that lands and flies again. Keep the joke. Just do not pretend it is the argument. The argument is that reliable power is industrial policy, and industrial policy is now compute policy. Close the plants, then act shocked that the large training runs happen in Texas and Virginia.

Sweden still has six reactors and about 7 GW when they are all awake. When several are down at once and the wind dies, southern prices do what southern prices do. That is the preview, not a freak storm. If Europe wants AI campuses that are more than press releases, it needs megawatts that show up without a weather app. New nuclear is slow. Keeping and extending what still runs is the part that does not require a vision document.

The money already voted with its feet. That is why a Swedish household that wants the growth side of this story still ends up buying the US market rather than waiting for Brussels to invent a socket. See also: How a Swede buys the US market.

Europe can keep perfecting the cap. Or it can put the reactors back in the plan and stop asking where the AI buildings went.