Amazon also relies on nuclear energy – Economics

In the end it could end up like a gold rush. It wasn't the gold miners who really made the big money, at least not the vast majority of them. The big money was earned by selling equipment to gold seekers: shovels, tents, supplies, and the like. One important piece of equipment when mining gold in the 21st century is electricity. It comes from the socket, but if you need a lot of it, when it comes to megawatts or gigawatts, special solutions and procedures are required. Just like in data centers where AI will eventually be trained and implemented. Major US providers, such as Microsoft, Open AI, Google and now Amazon, are investing in nuclear energy.

When it comes to AI, the mantra is often “a lot goes a long way.” You can throw so much data at concentrated computing power that the resulting AI models have as much training material as possible. This has gone so far that people are actually saying that the Internet has basically been grazed. But training and implementation require huge amounts of electricity. Experts expect that artificial intelligence consumption of electricity will rise within a few years to about ten percent of total global consumption.

So, Amazon bought a data center located right next to a nuclear reactor, and is also hiring people familiar with the reactors. Microsoft is reactivating an already decommissioned reactor on Three Mile Island in order to satisfy its data centers' hunger for electricity. Google recently signed a contract with a supplier of smaller nuclear reactors for the same reason.

In Texas, authorities require that anyone who wants to build a data center must also build a power plant nearby. In Asia, on the other hand, Amazon wants to focus on renewable energies to power its data centers there because it is difficult to build nuclear power plants there.