By Laila Kearney
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Major data center developer and operator Equinix has entered into several advanced nuclear electricity deals, including power purchase agreements for fission energy and pre-ordering microreactors for its operations, the company said on Thursday.
Big Tech’s race to expand technologies like generative artificial intelligence, which requires warehouse-like data centers that can require city-sized amounts of electricity at a single site, is driving up global energy consumption and raising fears about depleted power supplies.
The voracious energy needs of data centers has led to a rising number of preliminary power deals to fuel data centers with advanced nuclear energy.
Small modular reactors and other next-generation energy is not yet commercially available in the U.S., the world’s data center hub.
The Equinix announcement follows news that the U.S. Department of Energy earlier had selected an initial 11 projects for a pilot program seeking to develop high-tech test nuclear reactors with the aim of getting three of the projects operating in less than a year.
Equinix’s deals with advanced nuclear providers would supply more than 1 gigawatt of electricity to the company’s data centers.
Among the agreements, Equinix plans to procure 500 megawatts of energy from California-based Oklo’s next-generation nuclear fission powerhouses. It also entered into a preorder agreement for 20 transportable microreactors from Radiant Nuclear, which is also based in California.
In Europe, Equinix’s agreements to eventually purchase power from next-generation nuclear developers, ULC-Energy and Stellaria.
Equinix also entered into advanced fuel cell agreements with Bloom Energy, based in Silicon Valley.
The agreements are part of Equinix’s long-term planning for electricity to use for its data centers, as opposed to a quick-fix solution, Raouf Abdel, Equinix’s executive vice president of global operations, told Reuters.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Stephen Coates)
