The Seattle-based giant wanted to use electricity generated by a nuclear reactor to boost consumption at one of its data centers in Pennsylvania. It was turned down by a local grid operator, citing fears for the network.
U.S. regulator dampens cloud giants’ enthusiasm for their budding idyll with nuclear players across the Atlantic. For several weeks now, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle, whose data centers’ energy consumption is exploding with the rise of AIare multiplying their investment projects with energy companies, with a view to eventually taking advantage of decarbonized nuclear atoms to power their servers. In Pennsylvania, the first of these, AWS, signed an agreement with Talen Energy to increase the power consumption of one of its data centers next to a nuclear power plant owned by this local operator.
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However, the French energy regulator, the Autorité de Régulation de l’Energie, has just rejected a request from a local grid operator. The project, deemed too greedy, could “ have major consequences for system reliability and consumer costs “according to one of the authority’s members. AWS, like Talen Energy, will try to reverse this decision. Nevertheless, on Wall Street, energy companies with nuclear exposure, such as Talen Energy, Constellation Energy (which signed a similar agreement with Microsoft), Vistra Corp. and new nuclear start-ups have plunged on the stock market. Energy companies see these massive investments by American cloud giants as a business opportunity.
It remains to be seen how the Administration will react to the regulator’s decision. Several weeks ago, the White House, after receiving several AI industry leaders, promised to do what was necessary with the Department of Energy to facilitate the establishment of data centers, notably by resolving the problem of power supply.