Caixin News reported on November 6 that sources revealed that the tech giant $Meta Platforms (META.US)$ originally planned to establish an artificial intelligence datacenter powered by nuclear energy in the USA, but the plan was hindered, partly due to the discovery of a rare bee species on the designated land for the project.

The report stated that Zuckerberg had planned to reach an agreement with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide carbon-free electricity for a new datacenter to support his AI ambitions. However, sources indicated that this potential trade faces multiple complex factors, including environmental and regulatory challenges.

Two informed sources revealed that Zuckerberg mentioned at a recent Meta all-hands meeting that the discovery of a rare bee species near the proposed data center factory location has complicated the project.

Two sources stated that Zuckerberg informed all employees that if the trade can proceed, Meta will become the first major tech company to use nuclear energy for artificial intelligence and will have the largest nuclear power plant available for electrical utilities datacenter.

One of them mentioned that Meta is also exploring various zero-carbon energy transactions, including nuclear energy. One source also mentioned that Zuckerberg is frustrated by the USA's lack of nuclear energy policy.

Due to the continuous increase in Meta's capital expenditure in ai, Zuckerberg is facing tremendous pressure and needs to prove to investors that his bets can pay off.

Tech giants collectively bet on nuclear energy.

Currently, a war on artificial intelligence (AI) has broken out among large technology companies, and nuclear energy is increasingly seen as a way to obtain stable, round-the-clock electrical utilities. Recently, Meta's competitors - amazon, google, and microsoft - have each reached agreements with nuclear power plant operators.

The training and maintenance of AI models require a large amount of electrical utilities, with the power consumption of an AI query request nearly 10 times that of a standard Google search, driving a continuous increase in energy demand. However, the upfront costs of nuclear reactors are very high, take a long time to build, and nuclear fuel is highly dependent on countries like Russia and other.

This has led many tech giants to focus on existing nuclear power plants. In September, microsoft signed the largest power purchase agreement in history with Constellation Energy. According to the agreement, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of the most serious commercial nuclear accident in US history, will be restarted after being closed for several years.

Last month, google chose to purchase nuclear energy from Kairos Power, a small modular reactor startup. In March of this year, amazon agreed to purchase a 960-megawatt datacenter campus in Pennsylvania from Talen Energy for 0.65 billion USD.

As part of the deal, amazon will buy fixed-price nuclear power from Talen's Susquehanna nuclear power plant, the sixth largest nuclear facility in the United States. However, last week, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected the agreement citing grid reliability and cost fairness issues.

Critics of nuclear energy also raise concerns about the accumulation of toxic radioactive waste, stating that this waste must be safely stored to avoid serious harm to humans and the environment.

Editor/Lambor