AI’s rapid progress is anticipated to have an impact on global net zero goals, both positively and negatively.
Tech corporations are investing in nuclear power reactors to power AI data centers. Many of these power plants use nuclear fission, which is considered cleaner than fossil fuels and more dependable than wind or solar electricity.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley investors are putting their money into nuclear fusion, a still-in-development technology for generating power by fusing atomic nuclei. It has the potential to create more energy than fission while emitting fewer greenhouse gases and producing less radioactive waste.
Some industry leaders feel that nuclear energy could be the only dependable solution to meet the demands of the AI revolution.
“AI requires massive, industrial-scale amounts of energy,” Franklin Servan-Schreiber, CEO of nuclear energy firm Transmutex, told Business Insider. “Only nuclear power will be able to supply this massive energy demand reliably.”
However, creating a stable network of power plants remains a long-term aim that will require significant investment and government support.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, only 54 nuclear power plants were in operation in the United States as of August 2023. Companies such as Amazon and Google have reached agreements with companies that are developing smaller, modular reactors that are faster to deploy than traditional reactors. However, physicist Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, told Nature that the money is “a drop in the bucket” compared to the billions these firms will eventually require.
Meanwhile, IT behemoths may turn to fossil fuels to meet their short-term energy requirements.
“Tech is not going to wait 7 to 10 years to get this infrastructure built,” Toby Rice, CEO of natural gas producer EQT, told The Wall Street Journal. “That leaves you with natural gas.”
Rice told the Journal that at a recent energy conference, he was frequently asked two questions: “How fast can you people move? “How much gasoline can we get?”
According to the Financial Times, at the UN COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Big Tech companies stayed under the radar more than usual. Many exhibitors declined to show in the conference’s business area, sometimes known as the green zone. Some delegates argued that the increase in energy use for AI data centers had called the tech industry’s clean energy commitments into question.
“If our industry starts being treated like oil and gas, the public relations to counter that will be very expensive,” Kevin Thompson, chief operating officer at Gesi, a business group focused on digital sustainability, told the Financial Times.
According to a McKinsey analysis, data centers, which are now powered by a combination of natural gas, coal, and renewable energy sources, are predicted to increase from 3% to 4% of US power demand to 11% to 20% by 2030.
However, AI leaders believe that the intelligence revolution will ultimately result in an energy revolution.
“My hopes and dreams are that, in the end, what we all see is that using energy for intelligence is the best use of energy we can imagine,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he just received an honorary degree.
