Big Tech’s March Toward Nuclear Data Centers Picks Up Steam

Major technology firms’ embrace of nuclear energy as the answer to the data center industry`s power woes may have reached an inflection point.

Friday’s announcement that a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station would be recommissioned to provide power for Microsoft’s AI data centers capped a month in which the tech industry’s enthusiasm for nuclear energy has shifted from talk to action.

Companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon — and the data center providers they lease from — have long touted nuclear power as a key piece of the solution to one of the industry’s most pressing problems: how to access massive blocks of electricity to power the data centers needed for artificial intelligence and cloud computing while meeting ambitious carbon reduction goals.

Data centers added the equivalent of a second New York City to U.S. power grids last year alone, while the industry’s carbon footprint is expected to triple by 2030 due to AI.

The financial sector is joining the tech industry in pushing for nuclear as an energy solution. On Monday, a group of 14 major financial institutions — including Ares Management, Bank of America, Brookfield, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — expressed support for the effort launched at COP28 to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050....

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