Microsoft Electricity Purchase Agreement Will Restart Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant for AI Data Centers
September 20th, 2024Via: The Verge:
Microsoft just signed a deal to revive the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. If approved by regulators, the software maker would have exclusive rights to 100 percent of the output for its AI data center needs.
Constellation, the owner of the Three Mile Island plant, announced a power purchase agreement with Microsoft earlier today, which should see the site coming back online in 2028, assuming regulators approve it.
The reactor that Microsoft plans to source its energy from was retired in 2019 for economic reasons and is located next to a unit that was shut down in 1979 after the worst US nuclear accident in history. The plant that Constellation plans to reopen can generate 837 megawatts of energy, enough to power more than 800,000 homes — demonstrating the huge amount of power needed for data centers and Microsoft’s AI ambitions.
So, when all the electricity goes off for the rest of us, as we are told it will, some businesses won’t even see the lights blink. What is it about AI that can possibly need that much electricity?
Google says: “On average, laptops use about 30 to 70 watts of electricity. Large desktop and gaming computers use between 200 and 500 watts of electricity, on average.”
The total output of 837 megawatts divided by 500 watts of electricity is 1,674,000 gaming computers running simultaneously. What can they be doing that requires the equivalent of running that many machines?
Looking around me, I don’t see that many great improvements or new inventions for us civilians. Nor do I see anything so important that my electricity should be shut off to keep that thing going.
Must be plenty that I don’t know.
In your comment above, you mentioned gaming computers. Most of the power used in a gaming computer is used by the graphics card.
To make a long story short, graphics cards are good at a different sort of math than the CPUs that run a normal computer. The type of AI that is all over the place now (large language models) requires lots of chips similar to what’s in those graphics cards.
They use a lot of power and run very hot. Elon Musk’s AI supercluster Memphis is currently the largest in the world. The electrical load can vary by tens of megawatts moment to moment. They chose a facility next to a river because it will consume a million gallons of water per day for cooling.
https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/mlgw-planning-for-xai-supercomputers-demand-on-utilities/
All of these companies are trying to be first to create artificial general intelligence, which they think will give them godlike powers. And it could, assuming it doesn’t kill us all in the process. A real AGI will be able to escape whatever jail the designers have built for it. 100% guaranteed. This makes bioweapons / gain of function research look tame in comparison.
Here’s a brief video that shows what specialized AI computers look like, if you’re curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_tXcmEeGxo
A million gallons of water a day?
I grew up in Miami, FL. Up to the 1880’s, when real estate there first got hot, a person could wade into Biscayne Bay, wait a few minutes not just for a fish but for the kind of fish he wanted to swim by, and grab it for his dinner. By the 1980’s, you had to go out to the ocean or to the Keys to catch a fish. By 2000, there were virtually no fish, no shellfish, only some sharks and stingrays left in the bay areas.
The nuclear power plant in the Keys started operation in 1973. It increased the water temp by a few degrees. Some days, the water was hotter than the air when I swam in it. Of course, there were the sewage treatments plants for 2.26 million people, street runoff, etc. But several scientists had predicted that the heating of the water by the nuclear plant alone would have this catastrophic result.
Thank you, Kevin!
You’re welcome.
Re: quick note on cooling:
The cooling systems on datacenters are different than what are used on nuclear power plants. The data centers use evaporative cooling. Rather than circulating water around the the reactor, like a nuclear power plant would, the data centers basically boil off the water into the air. A data center wouldn’t heat the surrounding body of water like a nuclear power plant would.
Then there might not be any data centers in Miami. With the air at 80-90% humidity already, the place would be in a constant fog.