Tech Companies Going For Nuclear Powered AI

Now there will be less electricity for cars and other things that shouldn’t be electrified. For the rest of us, we’ll just get a bigger power bill for our houses.

Tech companies are increasingly looking to nuclear energy to meet their evolving power needs, potentially at the expense of grid reliability and ordinary American ratepayers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The owners of about one in every three American nuclear plants are negotiating with technology firms to reach deals in which the plants would sell tech companies nuclear-generated electricity to operate their power-hungry data centers, key infrastructure that the tech firms need to support the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, according to the WSJ. The trend could divert reliable energy generation away from the rest of the power grid at a time when grid watchdogs are warning of longer-term reliability problems as electricity demand is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years due to the proliferation of data centers, electric vehicles (EVs), advanced manufacturing facilities and more.

For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is close to reaching an agreement with Constellation Energy to buy electricity from an East Coast nuclear plant, and AWS also spent $650 million on a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania earlier this year, according to the WSJ. The Pennsylvania data center can receive enough electricity to keep the lights on in hundreds of thousands of households, and its purchase spurred tech sector interest in similar deals that allow companies to buy power directly from plants without needing to spend much on additional grid infrastructure to access that electricity.

Data centers may end up accounting for as much as 9% of all power consumption in America by 2030, according to the WSJ, and some officials — such as Pennsylvania Consumer Advocate Patrick Cicero — are concerned that the tech sector’s union with nuclear energy could hurt ordinary consumers by driving up prices and commanding a large share of the nation’s reliable carbon-free power.