Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have positioned huge bets on nuclear energy to safe electrical energy for his or her knowledge facilities as AI and cloud computing have despatched energy use surging.
But as Amazon and Meta found final week, these bets are removed from a positive factor. A collection of latest rulings from regulators dashed their hopes of discovering a fast repair for his or her electrical energy wants. For now, Microsoft’s plans to revive a reactor at Three Mile Island are transferring forward.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the roadblocks don’t have anything to do with nuclear energy itself, illustrating the challenges of constructing large knowledge facilities with out first locking up new sources of electrical energy.
Meta, for instance, is planning to construct an AI knowledge middle subsequent to an already working nuclear energy plant. But because the challenge progressed, regulatory hurdles started piling up. CEO Mark Zuckerberg advised workers in an all-hands assembly that one hurdle was the sighting of a uncommon bee species on the land, in keeping with a Financial Times report. (Many bee populations are at present fragile, at greatest, after many years of publicity to a brand new technology of pesticides, amongst different stressors.)
Amazon’s plans have additionally hit a snag. The firm is planning to construct a brand new hyperscale knowledge middle subsequent to the nuclear energy plant close to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and use a good portion of the plant’s electrical energy. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees the U.S. electrical energy and pure gasoline grids, voted 2-1 on November 1 to disclaim the growth of an present knowledge middle energy settlement that might have allowed Amazon to attach on to the ability plant.
The concern in Amazon’s case was that different prospects would probably endure decrease reliability — brownouts or blackouts — and better prices as the information middle would divert a good portion of the large energy plant away from the remainder of the area’s electrical energy grid.
This seemingly received’t be the final time FERC wades into the ability query for hyperscale knowledge facilities: The fee has a minimum of one other eight giant co-location requests to overview.
