What kind of company can initiate the reopening of a nuclear power plant? A digital and artificial intelligence (AI) giant. Microsoft thus announced, on Friday, September 20, the relaunch of unit 1 of the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania, closed since 2019. The symbol is strong because it is at this site, in a neighboring unit, that a nuclear accident occurred in 1979 which halted the development of this technology in the United States. More generally, the project embodies the offensive led by the bosses of the big tech companies in favor of nuclear energy, of which they are advocates, to meet the ever-increasing energy needs of their artificial intelligence software.
The contract announced on Friday is for a period of twenty years: from 2028, Microsoft will buy 837 megawatts (MW) of electrical capacity from the supplier Constellation, the equivalent of the consumption of 800,000 homes, the statement said. Microsoft would invest 1.6 billion dollars (1.4 billion euros), according to the Financial Times. Subject to regulatory approval, the project is the second reopening of a power plant in the United States, where about 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear power.
A few days earlier, the head of another digital giant had also made an unusual announcement: “Let me tell you something that will seem really strange to you. (…) We are designing a data center that will have more than a gigawatt of electrical power. (…)And there are permits to build three nuclear reactors there. These are small modular nuclear reactors that will power the place. That’s how crazy things get.”, Oracle founder Larry Ellison told analysts gathered for his quarterly earnings conference call. To justify his project, the specialist in providing online services and hosting to companies in the cloud cited the cost “astronomical” to train future AI models, which are increasingly demanding on computing. To stay in the ” career “, It will soon be necessary to invest “100 billion dollars” for a model, he assured.
A way out of the energy stagnation
Amazon had already surprised many by announcing the purchase of the data centre campus next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the sixth largest in the United States, in early March. To directly power these data centres, the world cloud leader will buy up to 900 MW of electricity from the plant’s 2.5 gigawatts of electrical power for $650 million, according to a contract signed with supplier Talen Energy.
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