In less than a month, companies signedMicrosoft“And “Google” and “Amazon“Supply contracts with a total capacity of 2.7 gigawatts, enough to provide power to more than two million homes.
However, this energy will be allocated entirely to meet the increasing consumption of these giant technology companies, especially to their data storage centers (data centers).
Cloud computing requires millions of information servers to store user data.
Development contributed Generative artificial intelligence Which requires enormous computer capabilities to process the information accumulated in giant databases, increasing the appetite for energy consumption among these major companies that are already hungry in this field.
The Electric Power Research Institute noted that data centers already absorb 4 percent of the electricity produced in the United States, and this percentage is expected to rise to 9 percent by 2030, according to what Agence France-Presse reported.
In addition, there are environmental goals set by the three main players in the field of cloud computing, which control about two-thirds of the market, according to the specialized website Dgtl Infra.
The Amazon group has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality in the year 2040, while Google has promised to achieve this achievement in 2030, which is when Microsoft aims to achieve a negative carbon footprint.
To this day, the three groups have relied on renewable energies. Amazon was already the world’s largest buyer of electricity generated by solar and wind energy.
But “renewable energy alone is not enough because it is intermittent,” as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who invested in nuclear energy, recently noted.
“I don’t think technology companies have fallen in love with nuclear power, but they want reliable, predictable energy around the clock,” said MIT nuclear engineering professor Jacopo Bongiorno.
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Microsoft chose the traditional nuclear path through an agreement with the energy company Constellation to restart one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island station, which is located in Pennsylvania. Another reactor there witnessed a nuclear accident in 1979 and was closed in 2019.
As for Google and Amazon, they preferred small, new-generation reactors known as small modular reactors, or SMR.
Amazon will also acquire a stake in the startup X-Energy.
A number of these startups are working on their prototypes, but none are operational yet.
Optimists expect the “small modular reactors” to enter service in 2027, but many prefer to set 2030 as the date for the start of commercial use.
Jacopo Bongiorno believed that the supply contracts concluded with the big names in the cloud computing sector constitute “a very important starting point, because these prototypes will undoubtedly not be able to compete in terms of cost,” according to an Agence France-Presse report.
“It needs a customer willing to pay more for continuous, low-carbon electricity,” the academic added.
The cost of developing the first small modular reactor is estimated at billions of dollars, but it may eventually become less expensive than traditional nuclear energy because its production may be in large quantities, unlike traditional power plants.
The US Department of Energy estimates that the megawatt-hour bill produced by the new generation reactor will be more than double the cost of solar or onshore wind energy by 2028.
Jacopo Bongiorno explained that the most prominent purpose of the “small modular reactors,” at least in the beginning, is to serve companies (data centers or heavy industries) more than it is to serve American families.
He stressed that “making money thanks to the (traditional) electricity grid is difficult, especially in unregulated markets,” which do not guarantee minimum prices for producers.
This is the case in a number of American states, such as California, New York, Florida, and Texas, which are among the states with the highest consumption in the United States.
He stressed, “It is a market, so the lowest price wins.”
On the other hand, Rob Bettencourt, of the investment company Apollo Global Management, recently said that “Amazon, Meta, Microsoft or Google” do not think according to the initial cost of electricity generated by “small modular reactors”, but according to a long-term strategy “and can allow themselves To be patient.”
