Oracle has received approvals to construct three small modular reactors (SMRs) to power its artificial intelligence data centers. The company aims to supply facilities with a combined output exceeding 1 GW.
During the quarterly financial report, Oracle's chairman and chief technology officer, Larry Ellison, announced that the database and cloud services giant plans to build three SMRs. These are compact nuclear reactors designed for mass production. Unlike traditional reactors at nuclear power plants, they will not require extensive supporting infrastructure. They are expected to be less costly to operate and able to generate tens or hundreds of megawatts of energy.
However, no SMR is operational yet, and pilot projects have yet to succeed. Oracle's interest in SMRs as a power source emerges amid plans to expand the number and capacity of its data centers.
“Oracle has 162 cloud data centers active and under construction worldwide. The largest of these has an output of 800 MW and will house a cluster of NVIDIA GPUs capable of training the world’s largest artificial intelligence models. Soon, Oracle will begin constructing data centers with capacities exceeding 1 gigawatt,” says Ellison.
The company leadership has not disclosed when the gigawatt data centers and SMRs will be operational. According to the most optimistic external preliminary estimates, the SMR technology as a power source for data centers will not be functional until at least the early 2030s.
Despite the potential advantages, SMRs face significant hurdles for widespread deployment. As early as May, the American Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that SMRs are “too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in the transition away from fossil fuels.”
Nonetheless, this has not deterred major companies from planning the use of nuclear reactors—be they SMRs or traditional ones. Earlier this year, Amazon acquired Talen Energy's Cumulus data center for $650 million. The facility is located near the 2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear power plant, ensuring the cloud giant access to 960 MW of power. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also shown interest in SMRs and has hired specialists to monitor their deployment progress.
Source: The Register
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