Data centers’ nuclear option

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As AI turns data centers into gigawatt gluttons, split atoms might soon be a staple of their energy diet. Data center operators and their customers are eyeing nuclear power to run their energy-intensive activities in a carbon-neutral fashion.

Reactors are attractive sources of wattage for data processing since they tend to have a larger energy capacity than fossil fuel or renewables plants and are often surrounded by vacant land that’s just asking for a data center to be built on it.

Big Tech goes nuclear

Amazon recently bought a nuclear-powered data center campus in Northeastern Pennsylvania that will eventually hoover up over 40% of the energy produced by an on-site reactor. The $650 million deal lets Amazon access the power supply directly from the source instead of competing with all the businesses and homes hooked up to the grid.

• Meanwhile, Microsoft hired two nuclear experts this year to spearhead its quest for alternative power sources.

• The company plans to offset the electricity usage at one of its data centers in Virginia through an agreement inked last year with nuclear power plant operator Constellation Energy.

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Searching for breakthroughs

On top of old-school reactors that split atoms (fission), the data center industry is banking on the experimental tech that smashes them together (fusion). Sam Altman plugged $375 million into nuclear fusion startup Helion, which aims to build breakthrough reactors that would operate on the same energy-producing principle as the sun. It has agreed to start pumping wattage to Microsoft’s data centers in 2028.

Altman is also invested in experimental mini reactors, similar to the ones on nuclear submarines, being developed by Oklo, which recently went public via a SPAC merger. (Altman is the chairman of Oklo.)

Nuclear wins…the clean energy aspirations of data center operators are welcome news for an industry that’s been in decline for decades and is often seen as a dusty 20th-century holdover.