Meta secures nuclear power for AI data centers-a 20-year deal!

Meta secures nuclear power for AI data centers-a 20-year deal!

Clinton, Illinois, USA - Meta has signed a long-term contract for nuclear power to supply its AI data centers. The contractual partner is Constellation Energy, and the agreement has a term of 20 years. The required electricity is supplied from the Clinton nuclear power plant in Illinois. The CEO of Constellation, Joe Dominguez, emphasizes that this contract ensures the funds for the continued operation of the system subject in 1987. According to Krone Constellation also has conversations with other potential nuclear power customers.

The increasing energy requirement for AI data centers is mainly triggered by more powerful servers. Forecasts of the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicate that the energy consumption of the AI ​​data centers will increase to 945 terawatt hours by 2030 and will therefore more than double. This corresponds to Japan's annual energy supplies today. Other tech companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), also show interest in nuclear power. Microsoft even plans to put the accident reactor Three Mile Island back into operation, while AWS and Google rely on new mini-core power plants.

The race for sustainable energy

The development of new cloud services such as that of tensorwave based on AMD technology shows that the competition in the AI ​​area is becoming increasingly intense. Tensorwave emphasizes the energy efficiency and cost advantages of its service and is aimed at companies that need high computing power. These solutions could be a potential challenger to Nvidia's dominant position in the AI ​​area. Tensorwave supports over 1 million models, including Llama 3 and Stable Diffusion 3, and also promises high speed and reliability for AI applications.

In the AI ​​industry there are also further developments in terms of energy consumption. According to the Tagesschau , the energy consumption of data centers for AI applications in Europe will increase to over 150 terawatt hours, which is almost a doubling of current consumption. This increase corresponds to about five percent of the total European electricity consumption, compared to only two percent so far. This increase in energy needs could accelerate climate change if it is not covered by renewable energies.

The need for clean energy

The majority of the electricity for data centers are currently still from fossil fuels, despite the obligations of large providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, to switch to renewable energies. Google reported that greenhouse gas emissions rose by 13 percent last year to over 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is almost entirely due to the increased energy consumption of data centers.

In order to cover the growing energy requirement, Google has signed a contract with Kairos Power about the acquisition of small modular nuclear reactors. The first power plant of this project is scheduled to go into operation as early as 2030. Xai has also put a new AI data center into operation, which uses 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, each consuming 700 watts. This leads to a total requirement of 70 megawatts for the calculations.

Global energy consumption by data centers is estimated to be four to five percent of the total energy consumption. In view of these developments, the demand for clean electricity becomes more aloud than ever. Massive investments in renewable energies and an expansion of the electricity infrastructure are essential to master the challenges in the energy sector.