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Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 16 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Personally? I don't think this is a bad idea. The less they drain from the grid, the less they consume fossil fuel.

The reactor isn't active right now, and they are a PWR design, and like the 1979 incident showed, they do fail safely.

So long as Microsoft pays for the operation of the plant? Seems reasonable to me if they're going to consume an assload of energy with or without public support.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

we could use that extra energy to offset a bunch of existing carbon emissions now. This is still waste. If it's going to be started up again, and its energy used for something useless, it's waste.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Is it going to be started up again?

If M$ doesn’t invest into this for their own purposes, is it still going to be started up? Or is your position that M$ should be investing in a nuclear power plant for the good of the world?

Because while I can agree with the idea, we all know that would never happen. So if it was never going to be started up again, we are at 0 gain or loss no matter what they do with it.

And that’s ignoring the fact that they are apparently intending on using that energy anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

it would be a missed opportunity in the sense of "if they can allow it to be turned it back on to waste its power on this dead-end tech, why couldn't it have been allowed to operate again (earlier) for reasons we actually need?"

I'm not putting the blame on microsoft here, even though it might seem that way. But it's not microsoft who need to give the go-ahead for this to happen. It's the higher ups who decided to give the capacity to microsoft.

Yes it was still going to be used, but they could have been paying out the ass for it, which could fund other projects.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 hours ago

Microsoft would do it with or without the power plant. Make no mistake about that.

The same argument could be said if they made a 1GW solar farm, or any other form of power generation. Unless you have a way to legislatively prevent Microsoft from producing their own energy or prevent acquisition of decommissioned plants, I don't see how you can prevent waste.