Amazon Just Put Millions Of Dollars Into Nuclear Power: Here's Why
For the better part of the past decade, Big Tech has consistently made wordy claims regarding its net-zero ambitions and plans to reduce the carbon emissions footprint from its entire supply chain. Now, the tech giants have turned attention to nuclear energy. Earlier today, Amazon announced that it has inked three separate deals towards the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
Amazon's AWS CEO, Matt Garman, explains that nuclear energy is scalable and more importantly, carbon-free. "Nuclear is a safe source of carbon-free energy that can help power our operations and meet the growing demands of our customers," Garman was quoted as saying. The company adds that its investments in nuclear energy will also open economic opportunities for the local communities.
Amazon's partnership with Energy Northwest, for example, will fuel the development of SMRs that are targeted to generate 320 megawatts (MW), eventually scaling up to 960 MW if the need arises. The other two partners in the company's nuclear energy endeavors are Dominion Energy and X-energy.
Notably, Amazon is not the lone player in the game. Fellow players, Microsoft and Google, also want a piece of the nuclear energy pie. So, why this sudden thirst? Amazon's announcement doesn't explicitly spell out the answer, but there's a hint linked to a previous nuclear energy deal. All the money Amazon is funneling into nuclear projects is ultimately headed toward its power-hungry data centers.
Where is all the energy going?
Data centers have lately emerged as quite the black hole for energy. First, it was the crypto boom, which paved the way for hungry mining centers sucking up juice from the grid. Next came the AI boom, or to put it more precisely, the generative AI storm that has opened a new avenue for white-hot competition between tech titans like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
According to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), AI could double the energy consumption of data centers by 2026. This hunger for energy is stretching these companies' climate goals as their greenhouse gas emissions have risen sharply while simultaneously forcing them to fulfill their energy requirements.
That's where nuclear energy comes into the picture. In Amazon's case, the company's latest push in the nuclear energy arena is worth over half a billion dollars. Prior to this, it entered into a partnership with Talen Energy, buying a nuclear campus for its data center operations after forking $650 million earlier this year.
The demand is urgent for Amazon as it seeks to stay in the AI race. The company is already deploying it for its AI-powered private investigator tool called Project P.I., inked a deal with leading players like Anthropic, and even pushed AI as a helpful chatbot for the namesake shopping platform. A supposedly carbon-free source of electricity, as per experts, will serve a dual purpose for giants like Amazon.