Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/16/amazon-goes-nuclear-investing-more-than-500-million-to-develop-small-module-reactors.html

18 Comments

  1. It bears mentioning that their interest in new electrical generating capacity is to power data centers and AI, not to help with the societal transition to cleaner energy. AI is remarkably energy intensive. It takes a ton of juice to build and train a model, and each search query to AI uses 10x the power of a standard google search.

    Hopefully, their quest for power may lead to advances in modular reactor design that might be deployed for public benefit instead of corporate profit.

  2. SMRs advantage is mass production. If 300 different companies try to make theese, the advantage is gone.

  3. what is Amazon going to do with advanced large scale AI that needs to be powered by nuclear reactors? track consumer behavior patterns for their own financial gain? that sounds like we’re entering a more dystopian world

  4. I will be stunned if the AI boom actually makes economies of scale a reality for nuclear power. 

  5. Amazon, Google, and MS all at the same time realized not enough power, at the same time someone may break how utilities work in the US.

  6. This is going to tie up a lot of smart people doing a dumb thing. These things are expensive, untested and inefficient and you still have nuclear waste you have to deal with and uranium to mine.

    Better to keep investing in improvements to renewables.