UTILITIES
Big Tech has fallen head over heels for the atom. Over the past 18 months, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have each struck highprofile deals with nuclear operators and developers as they search for ways to power their ever-growing portfolios of data centres.
The AI boom has been the catalyst here. Data centres have always had a large appetite for power, but facilities dedicated to AI use between three to five times more energy than their more traditional counterparts, according to Hanwha. The race to fill that deficit with a supply of round-the-clock, low-carbon energy has led Big Tech to nuclear power.
Why data centres need a different kind of power Data centres are not ordinary consumers of electricity. They need it constantly, every hour of every day, with no tolerance for the dips and surges that come with wind and solar generation.
Battery storage technology hasn’ t yet matured enough to deal with the intermittency of renewables at the scale Big Tech requires. This leaves nuclear as one of the few sources of what the industry calls‘ baseload power’, meaning a steady, uninterrupted supply of energy that does not fluctuate with the weather.
It was this logic that drove nearly 200 companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta and the chemicals group Dow, to sign a pledge in 2025 backing the tripling of global nuclear capacity by 2050. energydigital. com 81