Dr.Chartwell @drchartwell - Twitter Profile

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28 days ago

Something that isn't being talked about nearly enough is uranium. I’m going to be honest: it reminds me a lot of semiconductors in the 2010s. Cycles of extreme booms and busts over many years. I got into semis back in the 2010s because I believed that green energy was going to be solved with chips. I was ultimately wrong on the specific mechanism of the thesis, but regardless, I got the core macro theory right. Semis were wildly undervalued for the compute revolution that was coming. I now feel the exact same way about uranium. Look at where the world is heading. How do you believe we power all the AI models, space exploration, blockchains, industrial automation, and an ever-increasing human population over the next 20 to 30 years? Are we going to do this through coal, oil, or wind turbines? Probably not. But why? Both coal and oil are non-renewable, heavily polluting resources. Beyond the carbon footprint, tech companies committed to net-zero pledges literally cannot use fossil fuels to run their hyper-scale infrastructure without destroying their own corporate mandates. So what about wind and solar? They’re great technologies, but they carry a fatal structural flaw for high-tech compute: intermittency. You cannot tell a cluster of tens of thousands of GPUs running multi-billion-dollar LLM training runs to pause because the wind stopped blowing or the sun set. Data centers need continuous power. Battery storage is scaling, but using chemical batteries to back up multi-gigawatt compute loads continuously is neither economically nor physically feasible at scale yet. Geothermal and hydro are clean, but geographically locked. You can't just build a massive hydro dam anywhere you choose to locate a data center campus. Which leaves us with nuclear energy. Nuclear is the only energy source on the planet that delivers zero-carbon, high-density, 90%+ capacity factor power. The math behind the uranium thesis comes down to three main catalysts: Energy density: A single uranium fuel pellet—the size of a gummy bear—contains the energy equivalent of 1 ton of coal, 120 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The new bottleneck is energy: In the 2010s, the bottleneck was building chip architecture. Today, the bottleneck isn't the chips themselves—it’s the gigawatts required to plug them in. Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are signing multi-decade power purchase agreements (PPAs) directly with nuclear plants and funding small modular reactor (SMR) development just to secure their electricity supply. Supply-demand deficit: Mining and enriching uranium takes years of capital expenditure, permitting, and massive lead times. You cannot just turn a valve to double uranium production when demand spikes. Meanwhile, utilities around the world face massive unfilled long-term requirements while global reactor buildouts accelerate. Just like semis in the 2010s, the broader market is still treating uranium as a volatile, cyclical commodity play rather than the foundational, non-negotiable infrastructure layer of the AI and tech age. The world is drastically underpriced on the raw material that makes the future run. Uranium isn't just an energy commodity anymore. It's a technology play in disguise.

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