It was bound to happen!
Oracle has secured the permits to build three small modular reactors (SMRs) to power its AI data center. During its quarterly earnings call, the company said (via The Register) that it plans to use those tiny nuclear plants for a planned AI data center with at least one-gigawatt capacity.
The world’s need for substantially increased computing power and the electricity needed for that power seems to be becoming insatiable. AI is here to stay and companies are responding to that fact with ever more datacenters, ever more power, ever more water, and ever more chips.
We’re in crazy times.
I would not be surprised to hear that Oracle is going to push the limits and not just go for “at least one gigawatt” but rather aim for over 2 gigawatts. The output of small nuclear reactors varies (the A1B reactor for example “it is estimated that the thermal power output of each A1B will be around 700 MWth“), but with an insatiable need for power, and more space than on a ship to work with… we could see a “small” nuclear power plant become more medium sized.
And the data center itself, well, that’ll be quite a sight. A data center that requires 1 gigawatt is something to see let alone the possible 2 gigawatts that I’m imagining. The water consumption and heat generation of this monstrosity are going to be off the charts.
Now the safety of having nuclear reactors near whatever population center they’ll be nearest to will of course be on the top of resident’s minds and rightly so. Nuclear safety is no joke and in a sense we as a society are still working on making nuclear power work for us. For example we still don’t have great ideas when it comes to the processing and storing of nuclear waste… which is kind of important. We can’t just throw spent nuclear fuel onto a pile and call it a day.
It’d be great to see that waste problem solved… but nobody has done that… soooo won’t these new reactors just be adding to the problem? I’m sure Oracle did the math and found nuclear to be cost effective compared to geothermal and other alternative energy sources but did they think about all of that radioactive waste they’re going to produce? Was that factored in? If only we could see Oracle’s internal documents.
Oracle is likely keen on getting this project up and running. “Oracle has 162 cloud data centers, live and under construction worldwide.
What I was impressed with though was that Oracle has 162 data centers. I don’t know where I’ve been these past few years but that number is surprising. 162… Water consumption and energy consumption must be HUGE company wide.
It seems fitting that Artificial Intelligence would create a spent nuclear fuel problem. We were worried about AI taking over our nukes, we never imagined we’d be feeding the dang things our nukes.
I don’t think we’re prepared for what is to come. It’ll be seemingly mundane things like having a power supply bottleneck that will take us down rather than everyone’s fear of an omnipotent AI program.