U.S. nuclear plants won't power up Big Tech's AI ambitions right away

While Microsoft is hoping that restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant will quickly aid the need for electricity in its data centres, it could be a while before the project comes together.

A plan by Microsoft to use the restart of a Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help power its expanding data centers reflects the tech industry's hopes nuclear energy can be a quick and climate-friendly answer to its massive electricity needs.

But it will be tough to swiftly meet soaring power demand from the data centers behind artificial intelligence with new or resurrected nuclear reactors, as companies will face high regulatory hurdles, potential fuel supply obstacles, and sometimes stiff local and environmental opposition.

Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced a deal to restart a unit at the plant in Pennsylvania on Friday, in what would be the first-ever restart for a data center.

At the announcement, Constellation’s CEO Joe Dominguez called nuclear power the only energy source available that is both climate-friendly and reliable enough to support Big Tech’s needs, implying weather-dependent wind and solar energy may not be up to the task.

The announcement follows a similar agreement in March in which Amazon.com purchased a nuclear-powered datacenter from Talen Energy , and other nuclear contracts for data centers are in the works, power industry sources say.

The needs these deals aim to fill are huge. U.S. data center power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, which assumed natural gas, wind and solar would fill the gap.

Climate conscious investors and regulators are keen to ensure this spike does not trigger a huge rise in greenhouse gas emissions.