NextEra Energy is seeing strong interest from data center customers in restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, CEO John Ketchum said Wednesday.

“We are very busy looking at Duane Arnold,” Ketchum told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “We’re very interested in recommissioning the plant.”

NextEra is conducting engineering assessments on the plant and is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local stakeholders on evaluating a possible restart, the CEO said.

“Obviously, it goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, really data center customers in particular around that site,” Ketchum said.

The CEO said in July that NextEra was weighing whether to restart Duane Arnold. He cautioned at the time, however, that the company would only do so if the project was “essentially risk free.”

The Duane Arnold Energy Center northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa ceased operations in 2020 after more than 40 years of service. The nuclear industry in the U.S. faced a wave of reactor shutdowns over the past decade as they struggled to compete against cheap natural gas.

But power companies are pressing ahead with restarting recently shuttered nuclear plants as electricity demand surges from data centers, manufacturing and the electrification of the economy.

Ketchum’s comments on Duane Arnold come a month after Constellation Energy unveiled plans to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 2028 through an agreement with Microsoft.

Tech giants such as Microsoft are grappling with massive power needs as they scale up artificial intelligence. Nuclear is attracting growing interest from tech companies because reactors provide large quantities of reliable, carbon-free power. Alphabet’s Google and Amazon recently announced investments in next-generation small nuclear reactors.

Holtec International, a privately held nuclear technology company, blazed the trail for restarting reactors with the Palisades plant in Michigan. Holtec expects that plant to come back online toward the end of 2025. It would be the first nuclear plant in U.S. history to restart after shutting down.

Nuclear power may be making a comeback in the U.S. after years of setbacks — and big tech is the driving force.

As tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google compete to take the lead in the AI revolution, the data centers needed to power the burgeoning technology consume an ever-increasing amount of energy.

In the last two months, those three companies have penned deals to generate more nuclear power — perhaps most notably, Microsoft struck a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of the most serious nuclear meltdown in U.S. history in 1979. The reopening is planned for 2028.

Speaking to CNBC at the annual International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, long-time energy market veteran Dan Yergin described the turnaround as nothing short of extraordinary.

“It’s amazing, the change. The nuclear industry was in the doldrums,” Yergin told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday, describing the reopening of the Three Mile Island power plant as “symbolic.”

“Big Tech is saying, ‘We need reliable 24 hour electricity. We can’t get it just from wind and solar’,” he said.

Yergin, who has written several books on energy including “The Prize” and “The New Map,” pointed to the booming funding going into the sector. He cited $7 billion in venture capital going into nuclear fusion alone — which does not include financing for nuclear fission, a different energy-generating process.

“This is a really big change, and it reflects in this country, in the United States, a sense that — we’ve had for, really, a generation of flat demand [for] electricity,” Yergin said. “Now it’s going to grow, and there’s real anxiety about, how do you grow it? And nuclear [energy] is back in form, and people are talking about small nuclear reactors. And, of course, you have big tech actually seeking to contract for the output of the electricity from existing nuclear power plants. It’s an amazing change.”

Electricity demand is surging after staying largely flat for some 15 years, fueled by new data centers, factories, electric vehicles, and hotter and longer summers. A recent Energy Department memo cited in numerous press reports projected that U.S. power grids could see as much as 25 gigawatts of new data center demand by 2030.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it had closed a $1.5 billion loan for the revival of the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan in late 2025, which would make it the first American nuclear plant to be restarted. Google in mid-October said it would purchase power from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “deliver on the progress of AI.”

Global electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency sector is expected to double from an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 TWh in 2026, according to a research report from the International Energy Agency.

— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.

In March 2022, venture capitalist Chris Ahn was pushing to get into a hot crypto startup that was trying to make it easy for businesses to transact using digital currencies.

The company was Bridge Network. As part of his pitch, Ahn flew to a small town in northern Montana with a term sheet in hand for founders Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, who had both previously worked at Coinbase and Block.

“Nobody else had flown out to see them in person,” Ahn, who was a partner at Index Ventures at the time, recounted in an interview on Tuesday.

The three of them hiked together on a path with melting snow, and then conversed over drinks and dinner, as Ahn aimed to convince the founding duo that they should take Index’s money. At the restaurant, he looked to seal the deal.

“I told them I was going to the bathroom, and I ran over to my car, grabbed the term sheet and came back,” Ahn said. “It’s hard to fit a piece of paper in a jacket without crumbling it, and I didn’t want to give them a crumpled piece of paper, so I left it in the car.”

Index landed the investment, getting into Bridge’s seed round in 2022. The firm was part of a more recent round, in August of this year, that included Sequoia and Ribbit Capital and valued Bridge at about $350 million, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the valuation was confidential. Also in the deal was Haun Ventures, founded by former Andreessen Horowitz partner Katie Haun.

Ahn left Index to join Haun in 2022. Both his old firm and his new employer have reason to celebrate this week, after Stripe agreed to buy Bridge for $1.1 billion. With that outcome, Index and Haun are poised to triple their investment in a matter of months.

An Index spokesperson declined to comment.

It’s a particularly notable exit for venture investors during an extended IPO drought, and marks a big win for crypto, which has had few of them despite bundles of cash pouring into the industry.

For Stripe, one of the most richly valued tech startups, the Bridge purchase will be its largest to date. Bridge said the transaction is still subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions and is expected to close in the coming months.

Bridge describes itself as the Stripe of crypto, specializing in making it easier for businesses to accept stablecoin payments without having to directly deal in digital tokens. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the value of a real-world asset like the U.S. dollar. Customers include Coinbase and SpaceX.

“It’s a sign that Stripe is serious about stablecoins and crypto,” Ahn said. “Payments were the original use case for crypto, and it’s finally here.”

Stripe is paying a hefty premium.

Investors familiar with Bridge’s financials said annual revenue is in the range of $10 million to $15 million. At the low end of the range, that’s a multiple of 110 times revenue, and at the high end, it’s a revenue multiple of over 70.

“The reason why Bridge is so valuable is because it’s prohibitively difficult for a company to use this new stablecoin tech without developer tools that makes the tech easy to use,” said Ahn.

Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures said that while Bridge has rivals in the category, it’s the most successful stablecoin infrastructure business in the world, excluding the issuers like Circle and Tether.

“Almost every stablecoin startup we talk to is building on Bridge in some capacity whether it’s orchestration or issuance,” said Carter. “They are totally ubiquitous.”

Stripe saw its valuation plummet from $95 billion in 2021 to $50 billion last year, as private tech companies across the board took a major hit from the recalibration of the public markets. Its valuation reportedly rebounded to $70 billion this year as part of a secondary share sale.

Brothers Patrick and John Collison, who founded Stripe in 2010, have intentionally steered clear of the IPO process and have given no indication that an offering is on the near-term horizon. They’ve got a big business, with total payment volume surpassing $1 trillion in 2023.

Given private market demand for the company’s stock, the company has been able to offer some liquidity to early investors and employees in other ways.

“The private markets have been so generous with providing capital and secondary liquidity to shareholders that, if I’m the Collison brothers and I’m sitting around the table, I’m thinking, ‘Why do I want to go public?’” said David Golden, a partner at Revolution Ventures who previously led JPMorgan Chase’s tech investment banking practice. “Why bother if the private markets are willing to reward you with basically public market premiums and valuations and let you have secondary sales to keep your employees happy?”

When asked to comment, Stripe referred CNBC to CEO Patrick Collison’s post on X about the deal.

Collison called stablecoins “room-temperature superconductors for financial services” in his post, and said that Stripe is going to build the world’s best stablecoin infrastructure. 

Bernstein analysts are bullish on what the deal means for the $160 billion U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin market, noting in a report that the acquisition “validates the usage and growth of stablecoins as a legit use case for public blockchains.”

WATCH: Ripple’s XRP drops as Chris Larsen reveals $10 million donation to Harris campaign

German aerospace startup Lilium faces insolvency if it doesn’t raise emergency funding from the state government for the southeastern state of Bavaria.

Insolvency would mark a dramatic fall for a startup once touted as Europe’s best chance at building the 21st-century equivalent of “cars” that can fly.

Lilium is one of a series of firms trying to build “eVTOLs,” or electric vertical take-off and landing, vehicles.

Popularly known as flying cars or air taxis, these vehicles are being developed by startups in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Today, however, Lilium is in trouble. The company is desperately trying to raise taxpayer funds in Germany. And so far, it’s been unsuccessful.

In response to Germany’s decision to deny Lilium state aid, Hubert Aiwanger, Bavaria’s economy minister, criticized the move, saying it was “regrettable” that the federal government opted not to support the firm.

Danijel Višević, co-founder of Berlin-based climate technology investors World Fund, said that though it was “understandable” lawmakers denied Lilium support over concerns around the government supporting one single company over another, there was a misguided notion among politicians that air taxis are a “toy for millionaires.” This idea, he said, was “too short-sighted.”

Višević suggested it was unfair that U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla — which burned through billions of dollars before making a profit — was once able to receive a U.S. government loan, but Lilium was not.

Lilium struck major deals with the likes of Lufthansa in Germany and Saudia in Saudi Arabia. It also agreed a tie-up with Groupe ADP, an international airport operator based in Paris.

WATCH: eVTOLS: Are flying cars finally becoming reality?