Big Tech is racing to be the first kid on the block with a super-powered AI engine. To get there from here, you need super-power, as in obscene amounts of electricity. AI is an energy hog, and the bigger the AI, the more power you need. Big Tech also panders to the green narrative, greenwashes, and loves to virtue signal – and now the dreaded, awful. doesn’t count as green nuclear … is green.
All the big tech players are racing to buy, acquire, or reboot nuclear power plants near which they can build massive AI data centers.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all struck deals recently with nuclear power plant operators to fulfill rising energy demands from data centers as they race to train and maintain power-hungry AI models.
What about META, Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranded Facebook parent?
Meta’s plans to set up a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US have been halted in part because a rare bee species was found on the land, the Financial Times reports.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff about the issue in an all-hands meeting, according to sources familiar with the situation. The project has also faced other environmental and regulatory hurdles, and Meta is now looking for other ways to access carbon-free energy for its AI data centers.
Google is commissioning new nuclear plants. Microsoft is reviving Three Mile Island. Amazon is fired up about a plant in Susquehanna, PA. But they all face similar problems. The green to which they have long pandered has helped build bureaucratic and financial disincentives to Nuclear. It costs a lot more than it should and takes much longer than it needs to. Oh, and there are still factions in and out of politics that won’t brook a nuclear renaissance because it puts a kink in their energy-control freak agenda.
Guns and energy have something in common. The people in power want a monopoly on both—it is easier to manage the populace that way. Big Tech has, with few exceptions, been happy to dress itself as the modern oligarch of that regime, but demand might spawn competition, engineering improvements, and even better waste handling.
Making Nucelar more accessible or affordable is something the elites will want for themselves, but will the people sit back on their hands, satisfied with expensive, intermittent, prone-to-failure alternatives shoved at them by the same ruling class?
Favored industries will want the same access. Big Government. Big Pharma. They were already building a two-class energy economy. Is this more of that?
Update:
I shared this on Facebook and the removed it.
They claim it aks people to do somethng that violates community standards.
Ha. Funny people over there at FB. The only thing I asked them to do was read the trouble Meta find itself in.
