Within a week, two of the three largest cloud computing companies in the world signed 20-year contracts for nuclear electricity. Amazon has taken 690 megawatts from Constellation’s Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, including 190 megawatts of additional generating capacity expected between 2030 and 2032. Google has signed an agreement that will bring 890 megawatts of additional nuclear capacity into the United States.
Constellation is investing more than $4.3bn to upgrade 11 reactors across Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Neither agreement, however, involves building a new nuclear reactor. Rather, they are paying to generate more output from reactors that already exist – some of which are even older than the companies themselves.
A few years ago, such agreements would have seemed inconceivable. Nuclear power had fallen out of favour following accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chornobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Germany phased out nuclear power, while Japan shut down its reactors after Fukushima, although it has since begun restarting them.
In many democratic countries, advocating for nuclear energy became politically difficult. Today, an undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island is being brought back into service, with Microsoft contracted to buy its output for 20 years. The US Department of Energy is providing up to $4.4bn in loans to support the restart of three shuttered plants, with the aim of restoring about 2.25 gigawatts.
Palisades in Michigan, which was closed in 2022, is contracted to be generating again by March 2027. If successful, it would become the first US commercial nuclear plant to restart after entering decommissioning. In the last decade, the industry’s answer to AI’s energy problem was efficiency – things such as better chips, smaller models and smarter cooling seemed appealing and feasible.
Industry conferences featured discussions about performance per watt, with modern artificial intelligence (AI) chips performing more computation per unit of electricity than their predecessors. Yet those efficiency gains did not reduce overall electricity demand. Instead, each gain was quickly put towards something larger.
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