USD/BTC = $69,371 Block 868568
Amazon Web Services is investing over $500 million in nuclear power, announcing three projects from Virginia to Washington State. AWS, Amazon’s subsidiary in cloud computing, has a massive and increasing need for clean energy as it expands its services into generative AI. It’s also a part of Amazon’s path to net-zero carbon emissions.
AWS announced it has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. Nuclear reactors produce no carbon emissions
An SMR is an advanced type of nuclear reactor with a smaller footprint that allows it to be built closer to the grid. They also have faster build times than traditional reactors, allowing them to come online sooner.
Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers. Earlier this week, Google announced it will purchase power from SMR developer Kairos Power. Constellation Energy is restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft data centers.
“We see the need for gigawatts of power in the coming years, and there’s not going to be enough wind and solar projects to be able to meet the needs, and so nuclear is a great opportunity,” said Matthew Garman, CEO of AWS. “Also, the technology is really advancing to a place with SMRs where there’s going to be a new technology that’s going to be safe and that’s going to be easy to manufacture in a much smaller form.”
Virginia is home to nearly half of all the data centers in the U.S., with one area in Northern Virginia dubbed Data Center Alley, the bulk of which is in Loudon County. An estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic travels through Data Center Alley each day.
Pretty telling that it is power hungry data centers and AI that might finally get us on nuclear and not the global warming folks.
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Why are the datacenters all located in Virginia? Find that to be quite interesting
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Me too makes me think it’s all a CIA op
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My thoughts exactly! Definitely needs to be looked into, perhaps there are more reasons as to why this is so
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48 sats \ 1 reply \ @fiatbad 2 Nov
Your title reporting the value in BTC instead of dollars makes me so happy.
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Yeah. I want to track major infrastructure projects as BTC monetizes. We always see houses get cheaper in terms of BTC as time goes on but what about major construction projects? Will continue to take 7k BTC to construct nuke plants or will it fall to 700 and the then 7 BTC
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