Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are making big bets on nuclear power to power their data centers as AI and cloud computing drive electricity usage soaring.
But as Amazon and Meta revealed last week, these bets are far from certain. A series of recent rulings by regulators have dashed hopes for a quick solution to electricity demand. For now, Microsoft's plans to revive the Three Mile Island reactor are moving forward.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the outage has nothing to do with nuclear power itself, but points to the challenges of building large data centers without first securing a new source of power.
For example, Meta plans to build an AI data center next to an already operational nuclear power plant. But as the project progressed, regulatory hurdles piled up. The Financial Times reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff in an all-hands meeting that one hurdle was sightings of rare bee species on land. (Many bee populations have been exposed for decades to new generations of pesticides, among other stressors, and are now vulnerable at best.)
Amazon's plans have also hit a snag. The company plans to build a new hyperscale data center next to a nuclear power plant near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and use a significant portion of the plant's power. On November 1, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees the U.S. electricity and natural gas grid, voted 2-1 to reject an expansion of existing data center power contracts that would have allowed Amazon to connect directly to power plants. did.
The concern in Amazon's case is that other customers may suffer from reduced reliability (voltage brownouts or power outages) because the data center would disconnect a significant portion of the large power plant from the rest of the region's power grid. This meant that there was a possibility that the company would be hit by an increase in costs.
This likely won't be the last time FERC will delve into hyperscale data center power issues. The commission has at least eight more large-scale colocation requests under consideration.