In this aerial view, October 10, 2024, the shuttered Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant stands in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Pennsylvania.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
After years of setbacks, nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States, and big tech is the driving force.
As a technology giant like Microsoft, Amazon As Google competes for leadership in the artificial intelligence revolution, the energy consumed by data centers required to power emerging technologies continues to increase.
In the past two months, the three companies have signed deals to produce more nuclear power—perhaps most notably, Microsoft struck a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island A reactor, the island is home to the most serious nuclear power plant.
Energy market veteran Dan Yergin told CNBC at the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting in Washington that the shift was remarkable.
“The change is amazing. The nuclear industry is in a downturn,” Yergin told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday, describing the reopening of Three Mile Island as “symbolic.”
“The big tech companies are saying, ‘We need reliable 24-hour power. We can’t just get it from wind and solar,'” he said.
Yergin, who has written several books on energy, including “The Prize” and “The New Map,” noted that money entering the industry is booming. He cited $7 billion in venture capital funding for nuclear fusion alone, not including financing for nuclear fission, a different energy-generating process.
“That’s a very big change, and it reflects that in this country, in the United States, we’ve really gone through a generation of flat demand for electricity,” Yergin said. “Now that it’s going to grow, people are really worried about how to grow it. ?Nuclear power is back in form and people are talking about small nuclear reactors. And of course you have big tech companies actually seeking power output contracts from existing nuclear power plants which is an amazing change.
Power demand is soaring after about 15 years of being essentially flat, driven by new data centers, factories, electric vehicles and hotter, longer summers. A recent Department of Energy memo cited in numerous media briefings predicts that demand for new data centers on the U.S. grid could be as high as 25 gigawatts by 2030.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it has closed a $1.5 billion loan to revive the Holtech Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan by the end of 2025, which will make it the first nuclear power plant to restart in the United States. Google said in mid-October that it would purchase electricity from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “drive advances in artificial intelligence.”
Global electricity consumption in data centers, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency is expected to double from 460 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2026. International Energy Agency Research Report.
—CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
About The Author
