Taiwan's return to nuclear power driven by AI hunger for electricity - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Taiwan has announced plans to return to nuclear power generation, driven by surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence and data centre operations. The island nation is reactivating idle nuclear capacity and considering new builds to meet the power needs of the AI boom, reversing a decade of political movement away from nuclear.

Where this fits

Taiwan's pivot is a hard lesson in energy physics. When a modern economy needs firm, high-density power at scale and at pace, renewables alone do not deliver. The island faces the same grid mathematics Australia avoids discussing: weather-dependent generation requires either massive overbuild of transmission and storage (China-sourced batteries and inverters), or firm capacity. Taiwan is choosing the firm route because data centres do not tolerate brownouts and because AI workloads are not negotiable with the weather. This is the reliability pressure made concrete. Nuclear clears both the emissions and dispatchability tests that solar and wind cannot simultaneously meet.

What it means

Australia's ban on nuclear power locks the country into a renewable-plus-gas trajectory precisely as demand for firm, low-emission electricity rises. Taiwan's choice reflects a geopolitical reality: China controls the supply chain for batteries, panels, and inverters, while also dominating the processing of rare earth and battery-grade minerals. An Australian grid dependent on weather-matched renewables and firmed by Chinese-sourced batteries is not a path to energy sovereignty. Taiwan's move is not ideological; it is the pragmatic choice of a strategic rival nation in an era of AI-driven electricity competition. Australia's refusal of that option is becoming harder to defend as the cost of the alternatives, transmission overbuild, coal extension, or Chinese supply-chain dependence, becomes visible.