Amazon is the latest tech giant to embrace nuclear power as it tries to power electricity-hungry artificial intelligence programs.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of the Seattle-based electronics retailer, said Wednesday it will invest more than half a billion dollars in three projects — one in Washington state, one in Virginia and another in Pennsylvania.
The Virginia and Washington state agreements oblige AWS to raise money for electric utilities to study the feasibility of adding small modular reactors to existing power stations.
In exchange, Amazon will have the right to buy power from an initial installation of four small modular reactors.
Energy Northwest, a consortium of state utilities, will have the option to add up to eight 80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity of up to 960 MW, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 American homes.
The extra energy will be available to Amazon and utilities to power homes and businesses.
AWS reaches agreement with Virginia utility to build a small modular nuclear reactor near an existing power plant in Louisa County.
A small modular reactor (SMR) is smaller in size and capacity compared to traditional nuclear reactors.
“Modular” means they can be manufactured in factories and transported to sites for assembly, allowing for more flexible deployment and potentially reduced construction time and costs.
“Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
The SMRs will have their components built in a factory to reduce construction costs. Today’s largest reactors are built locally. Critics of SMRs say they will be too expensive to achieve the desired economies of scale.
Nuclear power, which produces electricity with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions and provides high-paying unionized jobs, enjoys broad support from both Democrats and Republicans.
But there are no US SMRs yet. NuScale, the only US company with an SMR design license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last year had to cancel the first SMR project to build its technology at a US laboratory in Idaho.
In addition, SMRs will produce long-lived radioactive nuclear waste for which the US does not yet have a final repository.
Scott Burnell, a spokesman at the US NRC, said “no specifics” about the planned SMRs have yet been presented to the regulator.
Google said on Monday it signed the world’s first corporate deal to buy power from multiple small modular reactors to meet electricity demand for artificial intelligence.
The technology company’s deal with Kairos Power aims to bring Kairos’ first small modular reactor online by 2030, followed by additional deployments by 2035.
The companies did not disclose financial details of the deal or where in the US the factories would be built.
Google said it has agreed to buy a total of 500 megawatts of power from six to seven reactors, which is less than the output of today’s nuclear reactors.
Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed an energy deal to help revive a unit of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, site of the worst US nuclear accident in 1979.
U.S. data center energy use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generating capacity, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs, which assumed that natural gas, wind and solar would fill the gap.
By postal wire
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