Happy Christmas 2025

‘Listen up!’ – Jesus of Nazareth

With the Eight Crazy Nights behind us, the Grinchy day is here, and soon we’ll all be looking at a New Year. While all this Festivus is in motion you might have missed some not-so-subtle yet somehow stealthy headlines. The US Congress just gave President Trump his presents early by passing the largest military spending package in US history – 2026 Nation Defense Authorization Act. The President was quick to sign it into law.

Busting through the front door at just over a whopping one trillion dollars, it’s enough to make the holiday buffet at the NFL team banquet blush. If you add in interest on debt from prior spending, military spending that goes on through other agencies, and veteran’s affairs, the real number is much bigger than $1T. With all that money going into the military system one might have wondered if we were at war. At least we can all feel good that the spending package is ‘defensive’ in nature. Peace through strength.

Like a teenager providing a wish list to their parents, also last week the office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) over at the Department of War (DOW) released their priorities for 2026: https://dowcio.war.gov/. Steering the IT juggernaut over at the DOW you have Ms. Kirsten Davies (CIO) and Mr. William Dunlap (Acting Principal Deputy CIO) – he was previously CIO over at DARPA. IT security and encryption specifically are hot topics with the CIO – Quantum requirements a plenty.

Executing these new priorities requires a massive amount of new computing power though, we’re talking Exascale, 10^18, double precision operations like multiplication, per second. Dozens of these new supercomputer environments are planned. All that compute needs energy of course which is estimated to be 30Megawatts per environment. 

Which brings us to the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Genesis Project. The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security, and drive energy innovation: https://genesis.energy.gov/. AI is an important underpinning of this program.

Chris Wright leading the DOE has his hands more than full keeping the lights on in the Midwest with clean coal plants in Indiana while he’s conducting one of the largest federal grant orchestration programs in history with Genesis in parallel. In a nutshell Genesis is $100B+, 40,000+ scientists, and 20+ moonshots. Collaborators from industry are the usual suspects, including IBM, Microsoft AWS, NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD, Google, etc.

DOE critical priorities and challenges:

– Advanced nuclear fission/fusion

– Grid modernization

– Drug discovery automation

– Critical materials research

– Semiconductor advancement

– Quantum computing  

We’ve written extensively about Quantum on prior posts but the big news here is the focus on Advanced Nuclear Fission and Fusion. In case we needed a bigger cue card, six days ago Trump Media announced a $6B merger with nuclear Fusion startup TAE Technologies https://www.cbsnews.com/news/. From a Fusion perspective, there are several active approaches: Magnetic fusion (ITER, Tokamak, Stellarator), Inertial confinement fusion (National Ignition Facility, Indirect drive, direct drive, lasers) and Magneto inertial fusion. We’re not going to debate which one is better. What we are saying at CloudNineData is that if there was ever a time for nuclear and the financial commitment to make it a reality, that time is now.

The theories and prototypes for Fission started back in the 1930s by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Later, over in the jolly old Soviet Union, the Russians took the idea to the next level with development of the Tokamak in the pursuit of Fusion circa 1950 – which is a donut shaped chamber that controls plasma (gasses) using magnetic fields. The atheistic Soviets are mostly gone, but the Tokamak design as mentioned above is still in use even today. In theory, the amount of energy released during the Fission process is a million more times than that released combustion like those in traditional electrical plants fired by Natural Gas for example. Said another way, a uranium fuel pellet the size of a Faberge egg has as much energy potential as 88 tons of coal. Fission is a real Nutcracker if there ever was one.

Nobody really knows what the output from Fusion will generate in terms of electricity at scale, but it’s akin to igniting your own private little star using the containment (hopefully) of the Tokamak or similar technology – hot. Fusion reactors will use hydrogen to fuse with helium among other things. Fusion carries the added promise of no radioactive mass extinction events while Fission still gives you a toxic waste hangover particularly if you spill it or fail to dispose of it responsibly. The National Nuclear Data Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory maintains nuclear properties for the entire periodic table. 

The Fusion approach is an international endeavor. Vast amounts of money have already been invested by Japan, France, China, Germany, Australia and the UK – all important collaborators with the DOE. In addition to Brookhaven, the DOE also has critical partnerships with the Plasma Physics labs at Princeton University, General Atomics, and the Argonne National Laboratory. 

If you are a scientist or an aspiring student looking for your opportunity to impact the world or at least make a dent in lowering everyone’s power bill, your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) has arrived. If you are an inventor, get busy. Critical components we need for Fusion generation are electromagnets, capacitors, containment wall materials, and the divertors. 

We’re a buy on peace, love, and Nuclear-powered Data Centers. Let it snow. Merry Christmas to all and to all a warm or cool goodnight depending upon where you live!