Amazon, Google, Microsoft looking at N-power for emission-free electricity

By Ivan Penn & Karen Weise

Technology companies are increasingly looking to nuclear power plants to provide the emissions-free electricity needed to run artificial intelligence (AI) and other businesses.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon have recently struck deals with operators and developers of nuclear power plants to fuel the boom in data centres, which provide computing services to businesses large and small. The demand has accelerated because of the big investments these and other tech companies have made in AI, which requires far more power than more conventional technology businesses like social media, video streaming and web searches.

Microsoft has agreed to pay an energy company to revive the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. And this week, Amazon and Google said they were focusing on a new generation of small modular reactors. That technology

 

has not yet been successfully commercialised but energy experts say it might be cheaper and easier to build than the large nuclear reactors that the United States has built since the 1950s. Big technology companies, which previously invested a lot in wind and solar energy, are now gravitating toward nuclear energy because they want power that is available around the clock while producing no greenhouse gas emissions. Wind and solar don’t contribute to climate change but are not available at all times. The biggest tech companies have all made pledges to power their operations with emissions-free power by 2030, but those commitments came before the boom in AI, which has demanded more energy.

“They have a desire to grow all this in a sustainable way, and at the moment the best answer is nuclear,” said Aneesh Prabhu, a managing director at S&P Global Ratings.

On Monday, Google said that it had agreed to purchase nuclear energy from small modular reactors being developed by a start-up called Kairos Power, and that it expected the first of them to be running by 2030. Then Amazon, on Wednesday, said it would invest in the development of small modular reactors by another start-up, X-Energy. Microsoft’s deal with Constellation Energy to revive a reactor at Three Mile Island was announced last month. Prabhu said that small modular reactors could cost about $1 billion each to build .

Technology companies are not alone in championing nuclear energy. US President Joe Biden recently signed a law passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress that its authors say will hasten the development of new nuclear energy projects. The Biden administration sees nuclear power, as critical to its goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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