An incident on March 28, 1979, changed the course of energy forever, at least in the USA. The Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station at Pennsylvania had a partial meltdown of the reactor core. No injuries or adverse health effects were reported, but the reactor was mothballed, and it aggravated already heightened public fears on nuclear power. So, it came as a bolt from the blue when Three Mile owner Constellation announced last week that they are going to restart the nuclear reactor, and Microsoft would buy the energy generated for twenty years. The reason: to meet Microsoft’s burgeoning need for clean energy for its massive AI data centres, as the tech industry tries to balance building giant energy-sucking AI models with their net zero and ESG goals.

The GenAI revolution sparked off by the ChatGPT launch in November 2022 has catalysed an insatiable appetite amongst tech firms and countries to build bigger and bigger AI models in their race towards AGI and global domination. AI bots are adding hundreds of millions of users and promise to reshape industries and societies. As Big Tech CEOs commit hundreds of billions of dollars to lead in this era-defining technology, they also face huge obstacles to scale. Availability of data is one, the price of Nvidia GPUs is another, but the biggest perhaps is the availability of clean and reliable power for both the training and the inferencing needs of Large Language Models. For example, Microsoft and OpenAI are contemplating a $100 billion AI supercomputer, and the five gigawatt it would take to power it is what it takes to power New York City today!

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 and require an investment of more than $500bn in data center infrastructure alone. 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 global concern this has spawned has led BigTechs to declare aggressive net-zero targets, which would mean almost their entire power requirements to be met by green power. They have signed long term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with wind and solar power companies, but as the Electric Power Institute reports: Those deals “typically do not match electricity demand hour by hour with local resources”, and so there is “no guarantee that all electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions are offset”. It goes on to say that due to this, the global goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will be missed, arguing “another 10 or 15 years might be more realistic”. The internal data released by Microsoft, Google and others support this claim. Thus, the gold rush for clean power. Other than the Three Mile Island revival, Microsoft has made other moves. They have tied up with Brookfield Asset Management in a $10bn deal to develop another 10.4 GW of renewable energy capacity across the US and Europe. It has even started dabbling in the hope nuclear fusion energy, with an agreement with Helion Energy and hiring people to build small modular nuclear reactors. Google is signing PPAs with companies to procure 100 MW of offshore wind farm energy.

The question to be asked is whether it is worth chasing the AI dream, with all this potential damage and the cost to undo it by building clean power generation. The tech industry certainly thinks so. McKinsey estimates( https://bit.ly/47DYYB2 ) that GenAI could help create between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in economic value throughout the global economy, making the billions of dollars invested worthwhile. Sam Altman believes that it will be Artificial Super Intelligence which will help humanity solve big problems like climate change, longevity, and nuclear fusion, thus making the investments worthwhile. Even Bill Gates has risen to the occasion by asking that “The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 per cent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” making the cost-benefit worthwhile. He also believes 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 worth it.

Every technology has raised these existential questions, and none of them have been so big as Artificial Intelligence promises to be. Another such tech was nuclear, where the spectre of Hiroshima made a fearful world clamp down on it. While there has not been another Hiroshima yet, the flip side was that we slowed down nuclear power generation in favour of coal and gas, which in turn, arguably helped accelerate global warming. There were no easy solutions then, there are none now.