The OpenAI app icon appears alongside other AI apps on a smartphone.
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Tech giants are turning to nuclear power to power the energy-intensive data centers needed to train and run the massive AI models behind today’s AI applications.
Microsoft and Google are among the companies agreeing deals to buy nuclear power from certain US suppliers to bring extra energy capacity online for its data centers.
this week, Google said it would buy power from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “deliver the advancement of artificial intelligence.”
“The grid needs these kinds of clean, reliable energy sources that can support the creation of these technologies,” Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director of energy and climate, said on a call with reporters Monday.
“We feel that nuclear power can play an important role in helping to meet our demand and helping to meet our demand cleanly, in a way that’s more on the clock.”
Google said its first nuclear reactor from Kairos Power will be online by 2030, with more reactors operating by 2035.
The tech giant isn’t the only company looking to nuclear power to realize its AI ambitions. Last month, Microsoft signed an agreement with the US energy company Constellation to revive an inactive reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, whose reactor has been idle for five years.
The Three Mile Island plant was the site of the most serious nuclear meltdown and radioactive leak in US history in March 1979, when the loss of cooling water through a faulty valve caused a reactor to overheat.
Why are they going nuclear?
Technology companies are under pressure to find energy sources to power data centers – a key piece of the infrastructure behind modern cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications.
Many developers rent servers equipped with GPUs (graphics processing units), which would normally be too expensive to own outright, from so-called cloud “overscalers” — such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
These tech giants have benefited from the wave of interest in productive AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But this increase in demand also led to an unintended consequence: correspondingly large spikes in the amount of energy required.
Global electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency sector is expected to double from an estimated 460 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 TWh in 2026, according to International Energy Agency survey.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, published A study in April last year found that ChatGPT consumes 500 milliliters of water for every 10 to 50 prompts, depending on when and where the AI model is deployed. This is roughly equivalent to the amount of water in a standard 16-ounce bottle.
As of August, more than 200 million people ask OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT every week, according to OpenAI. That’s double the 100 million active users OpenAI reported last November.
Environmental opposition
Nuclear power is not without controversy. Many climate activists oppose such supplies, citing dangerous environmental and safety risks and the fact that they do not offer a real source of renewable energy.
“Nuclear power is incredibly expensive, dangerous and slow to build,” climate charity Greenpeace says on its website.
“It is often referred to as ‘clean’ energy because it does not produce carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases when electricity is produced, but the reality is that it is not a viable alternative to renewable energy sources.”
Proponents of nuclear power, on the other hand, say it offers a nearly carbon-free form of electricity and is more reliable than renewables like solar and wind.
“If it’s built and securitized the right way, I think nuclear power is the future,” Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, chief executive of Northern Data Group, a global data center provider, told CNBC at a technology conference in London on last week. .
“People fear nuclear because of the disasters we’ve had in the past. But what’s coming, I just don’t see traditional networks being the sustainable force going forward in the development of artificial intelligence,” Kincaid-Smith added.
While Northern Data Group does not use nuclear power – nor is it actively exploring plans to use nuclear power as a power source for its AI data centers – the company wants to “contribute to this conversation because it’s important to the wider ecosystem, the wider economy,” Kincaid-Smith told CNBC.
– CNBC’s Pippa Stevens contributed to this report