The United States is entering a new phase in clean energy. It now combines artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data centers, and nuclear power in one system. At the center of this shift is Project Matador, aka Donald J. Trump Generating Plant, a plan to build an 11-gigawatt (GW) energy and data campus in Texas.
The project aims to become one of the largest clean energy and computing developments in the world. Led by Fermi America LLC, it could change how data centers get their power. Its mix of nuclear, solar, natural gas, and battery storage is designed to provide steady, low-carbon energy for the growing AI and chip industries.
The Vision Behind Project Matador
Project Matador is one of the most ambitious U.S. energy projects in decades. It will cover about 5,855 acres in Carson County, Texas, under a 99-year lease with Texas Tech University.
Source: Fermi America
The site will host four Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors, along with solar panels, batteries, and natural gas plants. Together, these systems will generate up to 11 GW of reliable power for large data centers and chip factories built on the same campus.
Fermi America plans to begin construction in 2026. The first nuclear reactor could start running by 2031, with all 4 completed by 2038. The total cost could reach $70–90 billion.
The nuclear reactors will use the proven AP1000 design, known for its strong safety features. The site near Amarillo was chosen for its stable geology, existing infrastructure, and strong power connections. The area also sits next to a long-standing federal facility, which helps with environmental and safety approvals.
Building the AI Energy Campus of the Future
Project Matador is more than a power plant – it’s a purpose-built, vertically integrated energy campus designed to power America’s next wave of digital industries: hyperscale AI data centers and advanced semiconductor manufacturing. By combining four Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors, large-scale battery storage, combined-cycle natural gas, and on-site solar, Matador delivers round-the-clock, zero-carbon electricity within a single, secured perimeter.
This model solves major challenges for high-tech facilities. AI systems and chip fabs demand continuous, multi-gigawatt power – often beyond what traditional grids can supply. Matador’s behind-the-meter setup keeps energy onsite, delivering reliable power directly to data centers and manufacturing plants. Its nuclear generators supply up to 4.4 GW of steady baseload, while batteries provide backup and frequency control, guarding sensitive compute clusters from outages. Natural gas and solar add further resilience, keeping operations stable even during grid stress.
For data centers, this means 24/7 uptime and low-carbon power for demanding AI, cloud, and security workloads. Hyperscale operations can use over 3 GW each, so every minute of reliable energy protects millions in value and supports technology leadership. Google, Meta, and Nvidia benefit directly from Matador’s self-sustaining grid, bypassing public utility risks.
Semiconductor manufacturing is also strengthened. Chip fabs are North America’s most power-sensitive assets – a single disruption can halt modernization and risk supply chains. By hosting robust, secure energy onsite, Matador drives U.S. onshoring under the CHIPS Act, boosting sector growth and jobs.
Alongside these benefits, the campus reduces grid strain, lowers emissions, and creates thousands of jobs. Fermi America’s initiative sets a new standard for strategic nuclear and hybrid energy infrastructure, anchoring America’s future in clean, resilient, and tech-driven power. With 11 GW of clean electricity, Matador reduces foreign dependence and supports federal goals for secure compute and chip operations – driving over 50,000 jobs and future-proof growth. Its integrated model establishes a global benchmark for sustainable, strategic industrial power.
Building Global Partnerships: South Korea’s Role in the U.S. Nuclear Comeback
The company signed important deals in South Korea for nuclear technology and component production. It signed a FEED (front-end engineering design) deal with Hyundai Engineering & Construction. This deal will kick off the engineering of four AP1000 reactors.
Also, it reached a deal with Doosan Enerbility. This agreement secures long-lead components, such as reactor pressure vessels and steam generators. These moves lock in key suppliers and help protect the project’s timeline and cost estimates.
Toby Neugebauer, Co-founder & CEO of Fermi America, stated:
“Doosan Enerbility and Hyundai E&C have been waiting for an American company to stop power pointing about nuclear and start building it. Their firm commitment to Fermi America positions us for action, leveraging their track record of success to build clean, new nuclear power at the velocity and scale the President demands and the U.S. requires.”
Fermi notes that it was the first company to file a combined operating license that the NRC accepted for review in September 2025. The company thanked Texas leaders. It also highlighted the state’s new $350 million funding for the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office (TANEO) to support the build.
These partnerships will boost the AP1000 reactor supply chain. They will also strengthen connections between the U.S. and Korea in advanced energy development.
The AP1000, built by Westinghouse Electric Company, is one of the world’s safest and most efficient nuclear reactor designs. It uses passive safety systems that can cool the reactor without human action or external power. This makes it ideal for modern, high-security facilities like Project Matador.
Fermi America will fund construction through a mix of private equity, REITs, and federal loan guarantees. This method shares financial risk. It also makes sure the project follows strict safety and environmental rules.
Nuclear Power’s Return and How UROY Stands to Gain From It
Projects like Matador show that nuclear power is making a comeback in the U.S. After years of slow progress, nuclear energy is now viewed as essential for clean power and energy security. The rise of AI, cloud computing, and electric vehicles has sharply increased demand for dependable electricity.
For investors, this creates new opportunities in uranium and nuclear development. Uranium Royalty Corp (UROY) is one company well-positioned to benefit. Based in Canada, UROY owns royalties and streams linked to uranium mines around the world. This means it earns a share of revenue from uranium production without operating the mines itself.
UROY also holds physical uranium reserves, giving it direct exposure to fuel price increases. As new reactors like those at Matador move closer to construction, demand for uranium will rise. UROY’s business model allows investors to gain from this trend without the high costs or risks of running a mining company.
UROY benefits when uranium prices climb or when more nuclear power plants sign fuel contracts. The U.S. currently produces less than 10% of the uranium it needs and depends heavily on imports. To fix this, the government is supporting efforts to rebuild the domestic uranium supply chain.
Source: EIA
As new U.S. nuclear projects start – including Matador, TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, and Oklo’s advanced fission systems – the need for uranium fuel will grow. That means higher demand for UROY’s royalty partners and assets.
Even though UROY is not tied to a single project, its portfolio rises in value as the global nuclear market expands. If the U.S. adds dozens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2040, UROY could see major growth in both royalty revenue and asset value.
The Bigger Picture: Clean Power for the Digital Era
Project Matador shows how the energy transition and the digital economy are coming together. AI and chip manufacturing need clean, steady power — and nuclear energy can deliver it.
For the U.S., this kind of project also supports national security, ensuring that data and computing systems run on domestic, reliable energy.
For investors, companies like UROY offer a simple way to invest in the nuclear revival. They benefit as more projects move forward and uranium demand increases.
The next generation of clean energy will go beyond solar and wind. It will combine nuclear stability, renewable flexibility, and digital intelligence, all working together to power the AI age.
Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: None.
Carboncredits.com receives compensation for this publication and has a business relationship with any company whose stock(s) is/are mentioned in this article.
Additional disclosure: This communication serves the sole purpose of adding value to the research process and is for information only. Please do your own due diligence. Every investment in securities mentioned in publications of carboncredits.com involves risks that could lead to a total loss of the invested capital.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
