Welcome to Nuclear Update.

Today, we’re zooming in on the mineral sitting at the crossroads of nuclear baseload power, AI data centers, and the global battery race.

Phosphate powers the future, literally.

And yes, I know what you’re thinking: Phosphate? Isn’t that the fertilizer stuff?

Let me explain.

⚛️ How Nuclear Power Powers the AI Boom

AI data centers don’t run on hopes and dreams, they run on electricity. Every model training run and every inference request consumes power, and the world’s data centers have now begun using as much energy as heavy industry.

Microsoft and Google aren’t building new hyperscale server halls because they ran out of closet space. They’re building them because AI workloads are multiplying so fast that entire regions are struggling to keep up.

The International Energy Agency expects AI-driven electricity demand to triple by 2030, which means big tech is now in the same league as national utilities.

That kind of demand exposes a weakness in the grid: AI workloads are spiky, rising and falling in seconds as clusters of GPUs ramp up, synchronize, idle, then ramp again. A single hyperscale data center can swing its power consumption by tens of MW almost instantly.

Even if it’s fed by a nuclear plant, which provides clean, reliable, baseload power 24/7 (I’ll never get tired of saying that), those rapid fluctuations can destabilize the system unless something absorbs and releases energy just as fast.

Historically, data centers handled this chaos with a messy assortment of backup systems. Diesel generators hummed away in concrete bunkers, ready to start if the grid dipped. Banks of older lithium-ion or lead-acid UPS batteries caught the micro-sags. And when demand really surged, utilities fired up natural gas peaker plants, fast to start, expensive to run, and decidedly not carbon-free.

The shift happening now is simple: hyperscalers need clean, stable baseload for most of their power, and fast, responsive storage to smooth out everything else.

Nuclear plants already deliver the first part beautifully. But even nuclear needs a partner technology that can handle the volatility on the demand side, turning a steady power source into a perfectly balanced supply.

That partner, increasingly, is the lithium iron phosphate battery, better known as LFP.

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally relied on nickel, cobalt, and manganese. They worked well for early EVs, but the chemistry is expensive, geopolitically messy, and environmentally burdensome. LFP flips that equation. Built around lithium, iron, and phosphate (duh), it’s safer, cheaper, and far more stable.

Phosphate is what makes LFP thermally stable, non-flammable, long-lasting, and scalable enough to handle AI-scale loads. And it also happens to be the one part of the battery chain where the West has almost no integrated, mine-to-market capacity.

That’s why companies from Tesla to BYD to every major grid-storage developer are shifting their long-duration systems toward LFP technology.

LFP is dominating global battery production, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all current output. The LFP market alone is forecast to grow from USD 18.7 billion in 2024 to more than USD 90 billion by 2034.

And as LFP becomes the dominant chemistry, the spotlight inevitably shifts upstream to the materials that make it possible, which is exactly where First Phosphate enters the picture (more on that later).

🧪 Why LFP Batteries Have Taken Over

LFP batteries are built for exactly the kind of punishing duty cycle AI requires: they can absorb rapid spikes, discharge just as quickly, and repeat the cycle thousands of times with minimal wear.

They’re thermally stable, meaning lower fire risk, an enormous deal when you’re powering a billion dollars’ worth of servers under one roof. And unlike traditional nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries, they avoid expensive and geopolitically sensitive metals. Iron and phosphate are abundant, predictable, and far easier to scale.

This is why the grid-storage world has undergone a chemistry revolution. Just a few years ago, most large battery projects relied on NMC technologies inherited from the electric vehicle industry. Today, the market has flipped. Utilities, microgrids, and data-center operators are moving to LFP at extraordinary speed, because the economics, safety profile, and lifecycle costs are all significantly better.

The result is a new kind of energy stack emerging across North America: nuclear reactors providing the constant, clean, baseload; LFP battery farms as the grid’s shock absorbers; and AI data centers sitting on the other end of the wire with demand curves that look more like heartbeats than baseload consumption.

And at the center of that system is phosphate. Without phosphate, there is no LFP. Without LFP, the AI-nuclear pairing becomes far more difficult to operate.

And it is not just AI data centers, it’s robotics, electric vehicles, and factory automation as well.

🤖 Where Phosphate Shows Up Across the Modern Economy

As electrification accelerates across multiple sectors, LFP batteries and phosphate are showing up in more places than most people realize.

• Robotics: Industrial robots and autonomous systems depend on power modules that can withstand constant cycling, quick charging, and high thermal loads. LFP’s stability and long cycle life make it the preferred chemistry for large-scale automation.

• Energy Storage: From utility-scale projects to commercial microgrids, LFP batteries are emerging as the standard for safe, long-duration, cost-effective storage. Phosphate is the critical ingredient that enables this shift.

• Factory Automation: Modern factories rely on tightly controlled, uninterrupted power for sensors, actuators, and high-frequency switching systems. Phosphate-based materials help stabilize these loads and support continuous automated production.

• Mobility: Delivery fleets, municipal transport, e-bikes, and short-range vehicles are adopting LFP because it handles daily cycling and fast charging with minimal degradation, a perfect fit for high-use mobility.

• Electric Vehicles: Automakers around the world are integrating LFP packs into mainstream EV lines, especially for fleet vehicles and mass-market models. The economics and safety profile are accelerating this transition, and phosphate demand scales with it.

If phosphate is going to fuel everything from AI infrastructure to mobility, robotics, and grid storage, someone needs to build a Western supply chain capable of producing battery-grade phosphate at scale.

That’s where First Phosphate comes in.

⚡How First Phosphate Fits Into the LFP Future

Once you trace the LFP supply chain far enough back, the picture becomes clear: the real bottleneck isn’t lithium, and it isn’t manufacturing capacity, it’s battery-grade phosphate.

And unlike lithium, cobalt, or nickel, phosphate has almost no Western supply chain capable of taking raw rock and turning it into the purified phosphoric acid (PPA) needed for LFP cathodes.

This is the gap First Phosphate (CSE: PHOS, OTCQX: FRSPF) is building itself to fill.

First Phosphate is a North American mineral development and cleantech company headquartered in Québec. Its entire business model is built around one idea: create a vertically integrated, mine-to-market LFP supply chain for North America. The company targets exactly the sectors you have just read about, energy storage, data centers, robotics, and mobility.

The core of that strategy is geology. Only about 5% of global phosphate deposits are igneous, the high-purity form required for efficient PPA production. First Phosphate’s flagship Bégin-Lamarche property sits in Québec and is one of the few known igneous phosphate deposits in North America.

With it, First Phosphate controls one of the largest known igneous systems in a Tier-1 jurisdiction, with 41.5 million tonnes indicated and 214 million tonnes inferred, that’s enough to support decades of battery-grade phosphate production at industrial scale. The company is advancing the Bégin-Lamarche property through drilling, resource work and engineering.

From there, the mine-to-market story starts to look very real. First Phosphate has already completed pilot production of battery-grade PPA, then converted it into iron phosphate precursor, LFP cathode active material and finally into commercial-grade LFP battery cells made entirely from North American critical minerals.

To support that, the company has secured an industrial land option at Port Saguenay, where it intends to build a phosphoric acid plant. The Port Saguenay site offers rail and vessel access to North American and European offtakers (with which it has definitive agreements), existing heavy infrastructure and room to grow, and it links directly to planned downstream LFP material production in the region.

Policy tailwinds are building around it. Canada already recognize phosphate as a critical mineral, and in November 2025 the United States added phosphate to its Final 2025 Critical Minerals List, after a consultation process where First Phosphate itself submitted a detailed brief on the role of LFP in energy storage, data centres, robotics, mobility and defence.

Most Western phosphate assets will only ever feed fertilizer due to their lower grades. First Phosphate is building something different, a North American backbone for the LFP battery industry, from the ground all the way to finished LFP batteries to onshore our supply-chain independence.

The direction of travel is clear: more downstream agreements and a tighter link between North American geology and the energy systems that will power this decade.

⚛️ Wrapping Up

AI, electrification, mobility, robotics, none of it works without the chemistry behind LFP. It’s the quiet, supporting player behind the technologies that keep changing the world.

First Phosphate is planting its flag early in that landscape. Not with hype, but with geology, engineering, technology, and a blueprint for turning one of North America’s rare igneous deposits into a full industrial supply chain.

The energy systems of this decade will be built on materials like this igneous phosphate, because the future isn’t built on predictions, it’s built on the materials that make those predictions possible.

– Fredrik

For more information on First Phosphate’s work, visit their website https://firstphosphate.com/

Disclosure: This Deep Dive was created in collaboration with First Phosphate, which sponsored this post. All analysis and opinions are those of Nuclear Update.

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. Nuclear Update is for informational and educational purposes only, it’s here to help you understand the world of uranium, energy, and the markets that orbit them, not to tell you what to buy or sell. Nothing in this article should be taken as a recommendation or solicitation to make any financial decision. Always do your own research, double-check sources, and talk to a licensed professional before making investments. Markets move fast, opinions change, and yes, sometimes even Fredrik gets things wrong.