Nuclear energy was the Artificial Intelligence of the 1960s. Much like AI today, it generated unprecedented excitement and hype across the world. Despite its known dangers – after all Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quite recent – there was great optimism of how nuclear technology could change the world with abundant cheap energy and free humanity from the tyranny of fossil fuels. Capturing this zeitgeist, US President Eisenhower delivered the famous United nations speech ‘Atoms for Peace’ in 1953, pledging nuclear power for clean, abundant energy, rather than for death and destruction. The US was particularly excited to harness the power of the atom, as it rolled out nuclear power plants and submarines, and even considered nuclear aircraft. However, the euphoria gave way to panic, when in March 1979, the reactor core of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station at Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. The ensuing alarm and panic meant that this technology which could create the clean, abundant energy hit a big speed bump. Nuclear tech never recovered from that – multiple reactors closed and the share of nuclear power declined. Today, most plants in the US are 30 to 50 years old, and the cost of setting up these are prohibitive, with a recent one in the US costing $35bn to build.

Cut to 60 years later, however, and AI is the new nuclear. There is extraordinary excitement as trillion-dollar companies and scorching hot startups race to build bigger and better AI models. But even as the money flows and enthusiasm reach a fever pitch, there are dark clouds ahead, with the darkest around the unquenchable thirst for energy, preferably green, that AI models and data centres have. I have written in this publication of how insatiable this demand is. For instance, the Electric Power Institute expects data centres to consume up to 9 per cent of US electricity generation by 2030, more than double what they currently use. This translates to fifty gigawatts of additional power needed by 2030 in the US alone, a colossal amount of energy which could power ten New Yorks. Most of the power generated across the world is coal and other fossil fuels, making it one of the top contributors to CO2 emissions and global warming. The Institute reports due to this unprecedented need for energy, the global goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will be missed, arguing “another 10 or 15 years might be more realistic.”

This harsh reality has set off a mad scramble for clean energy. While companies are scrounging around for wind and solar power, the most noticeable action is around nuclear. Amazon has announced three deals in this area, including buying a $650mn nuclear-powered data center outright. Google signed a power purchase agreement with a California nuclear energy startup, Kairos Power. But the biggest eyeball grabbing move was the one that takes us back to the Three Mile Island reactor, when its owner Constellation Energy announced last week that they are going to restart the nuclear reactor, and Microsoft would buy the energy generated for twenty years. Microsoft has set stiff net-zero targets for itself, and has made other moves – they tied up with Brookfield Asset Management in a $10bn deal to develop 10.4 GW of renewable energy capacity across the US and Europe. It has even invested in the distant hope of nuclear fusion energy, with an agreement with Helion Energy, a fusion startup. Even in India, Microsoft has struck a clean energy deal with ReNew power. Microsoft President Brad Smith has gone on record to highlight the potential of repurposing existing coal-fired power plants with advanced nuclear technologies, saying: “You can cut the cost of constructing a new nuclear plant by a third by converting these plants, and we can use the power of cloud computing, AI, and data to accelerate all of that.” Founder Bill Gates is a big proponent too, having co-founded

TerraPower, a company focused on developing advanced nuclear reactors, including designs that address traditional safety and waste management concerns about nuclear power.

It is an interesting conundrum. While many experts believe that AI’s insatiable energy demands will accelerate the march towards climate change, optimists like Gates and others believe that the reverse could be true. Big Tech has now an incentive to invest hugely in clean energy, led by nuclear power, and has an equally large need to do so as they chase the AI dream. Bill Gates argues that big techs would pay a ‘green premium’ for clean energy, thus incentivizing its development and deployment over fossil fuel, and so the net would be positive for the planet. The AI techno-optimists have believed and promised us that when Artificial General Intelligence is achieved it would solve these big, hairy problems like climate change and global warming for humanity; in a very convoluted and unintended way, it has started solving them even before that.