As the push to use nuclear power to meet the massive electrical demands of AI-driven data centers accelerates, both Meta and Amazon have run into roadblocks that have stymied their plans for two locations.
Mother Nature took a hand in thwarting Meta’s project to build an AI data center near an unnamed nuclear facility, the Financial Times reported this week. Surveyors reviewing the site discovered a rare species of bee, causing environmental regulators to halt the project. According to unnamed “people familiar with the meeting,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since cancelled it entirely, telling employees at an all-hands meeting that the discovery would have further complicated the project, the Financial Times reported.
That doesn’t mean that Meta has abandoned its carbon-free dreams, however. In a wide-ranging interview on the Dwarkesh podcast earlier this year, Zuckerberg spoke about energy bottlenecks (beginning at timestamp 25:30) and the regulatory challenges involved in powering facilities. This latest development will be viewed as yet another bump in the road.
Amazon’s problems are more mundane: the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected an application to draw additional power from the Susquehanna, Penn. nuclear facility to operate the adjacent Cumulus data center it acquired in March from Talen Energy for $650 million and planned to expand.
The application from grid operator PJM Interconnection and the plant, which is majority owned by Talen, had requested permission to up the power to the co-located data center from the current 300MW to 480MW.
Co-located facilities connect directly to the power plant, bypassing the transmission grid, and regulators said that PJM had not provided sufficient justification for the amendment to the interconnection service agreement (ISA) allowing the increased power. FERC held a technical conference on Nov. 1 to discuss the co-location issue in the face of concerns about having adequate power to feed the grid when co-located facilities were slurping up vast amounts of electricity. There were worries that the transmission grid doesn’t even have the capacity to carry all of the power necessary to fuel needs, and that the co-located facilities would not be contributing to upgrading it. This, FERC argued, could threaten the reliability of the grid and lead to higher electricity rates.
Despite this setback, Bloomberg has reported that Amazon remains committed to the project.
Source:: Network World