A lot of power for AI and cloud datacenters.

Modern AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and it looks like they will get even more power-hungry in the coming years as companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI strive towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). Oracle has already outlined plans to use nuclear power plants for its 1-gigawatt datacenters. It looks like Microsoft plans to do the same as it just inked a deal to restart a nuclear power plant to feed its data centers, reports Bloomberg.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    154·
    2 months ago

    Nuclear safety and penny-pinchers capitalism don’t make good bedfellows.

    ftfy. Possibly ironically, nuclear safety and communism (or totalitarianism) don’t work either. It’s odd, innit.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      2 months ago

      Pretty sure it has to do with how the plant is designed and operated as opposed to what economic or governmental system it happens to exist under.

      • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Doesn’t that design and operation get created by the economic or governmental system it’s under?

        • Doomsider@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          2 months ago

          I think with the USSR at least, that their reactor designs were supposed to be less safe than western reactor designs.

          Was it because they were a shitty oligarchy claiming to be communist? Maybe, they did make a lot of garbage decisions.

          I think the US has the record for most nuclear disasters by a lot but two of the worst were in the USSR.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
            71·
            2 months ago

            They were actually designed to be very safe. It was thought that they literally couldn’t fail dangerously. Chernobyl was a huge fluke (that had preventions put in place to ensure it never happened again) that was just a lot of weird things combining at once. The other reactors at Chernobyl continued operating for decades safely, similarly to three mile island which only stopped on 2019 because it wasn’t profitable, but now it appears it is again. Both of these nations (and child nations/successors) continued to operate many more nuclear plants without issues. Nuclear is, by far, the safest energy source, including green energy like solar.