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Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 2 months ago by irreticent to c/technology

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Modern AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and it looks like they will get even more power-hungry in the coming years as companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI strive towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). Oracle has already outlined plans to use nuclear power plants for its 1-gigawatt datacenters. It looks like Microsoft plans to do the same as it just inked a deal to restart a nuclear power plant to feed its data centers, reports Bloomberg.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???

[–] Korkki 32 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Investors want it, because they want to ride the wave towards profit. It doesn't matter if it's good, sustainable or not. That is what matters.

[–] pdxfed 2 points 2 months ago

A tax break for "clean energy", "strategic investment corridor" or "self-poweting companies" to reduce the load on the grid (that a few enormous companies like MS are creating) will be written into law, if it isn't already, and it will be a complete tax write-off or something so they get to reap any rewards and when AI hype dies down they'll still have increased profits by reducing taxes. When you win/win by owning the system you just win.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

that nobody wants

lol

[–] Doomsider 12 points 2 months ago

A lot of the cost is building a giant centralized nuclear facility. Once they are built it is not nearly as expensive to run them.

I think this is generally a good thing. Companies should be thinking of ways to supply their power needs.

Having said that, people want a good AI. The LLMs they are working on are probably not that. I am very skeptical we are anywhere close to where the hype train has taken us

[–] douglasg14b 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Just because you don't want it doesn't mean others don't.

And just because you don't know much about the actual tech product itself doesn't mean that it's as narrow as you consider it to be.

There is a ton of vapid hype that everyone including myself is getting sick and tired of. I'm more than happy to recognize that. However, there are still real world problems and continued advancements being made daily.

It's not all about LLMs either, there are many other types of science being done to develop improve and augment various other flavors of artificial intelligence. This has been a pretty constant trend for at least the last 10 years, we've just had a recent explosion in language capabilities with the introduction of generative AI. Thus fueling the hype.

That's a really weird stance that I keep seeing on here which is to be proud of being ignorant. Being proud of hating something without actually understanding what it is. Being proud of not knowing how something works so that you can be more contrare.