On September 20, Microsoft bought Three Mile Island, an old nuclear plant located in the state of Pennsylvania. In fact, they agreed to a deal where they would reopen the unit for the sole purpose of supporting the energy demand of their artificial intelligence models.

In 1979, one of the units suffered a meltdown, so they shut down the entire plant. It is recently that Microsoft made a big move by buying this island to rely on reliable energy sources for the future.

Microsoft plans to create their electricity using nuclear plants. Compared to other energy sources like solar or wind, nuclear power is the only one that we can count on all the time. The advantage is that it doesn’t rely on natural phenomena to function; however, it costs a lot of money. Consequently, the company has invested 1.6 billion dollars into the project.

Advanced technology like AI has created a sudden surge in electricity demand. “Data centers need a lot of energy to run, especially the hyperscale ones that AI tends to run on. And they need to have reliable sources of energy.” — Sacha Luccioni, lead climate researcher at an AI company.

“Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” said Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez in a press release.

Indeed, artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI, requires an insane amount of energy to work effectively and collect all of the data. In fact, servers and data centers use about 1 to 1.5% of the global electricity to operate and collect massive amounts of data. Those numbers are going to rise even more in the future as artificial intelligence continues to expand. The energy demand for AI is so big that it is approximately the same as that of some small countries.

Considering the massive energy needed to run AI models, it is alarming to think that it is only going to get bigger and bigger as the years fly. Artificial intelligence is used in many fields, such as teaching, bureaucracy, and trading, etc. Imagine how it will look in ten years from now.