Big tech companies are going nuclear - both figuratively and literally in the rush to power their hyperscale data centers. According to Google’s 2024 Environmental Report power demands have roughly doubled over the past 4 years.
With the rise of AI and the extensive requirements to train AI models, big tech companies have needed to build out hyperscale data centers.
A hyperscale data center is exactly what it sounds like, a data center at the biggest scale which can encompass thousands of servers, miles of connection equipment, and take up millions of square feet of space.
These data centers are huge, Mark Zuckerberg recently commented that size of Meta’s upcoming data center was close to the entire island of Manhattan.
In March, it was estimated there were 1,136 hyperscale data centers in the world, half of them in the United States, and its forecasted that 130 data centers will come online every year.
Of course, these hyperscale data centers have massive power demands from running thousands of servers, graphics cards, and keeping them cool. Not to mention the millions of cubic meters of water that is used every year to keep these components cool.
By now, big tech has bought up all reasonable sources of power, and 2024 was the first year where the biggest players started making sophisticated “power plays”, making acquisitions and investments into energy projects such as geothermal, gas, solar, wind, and even nuclear.
This trend is punctuated in the past few weeks with Meta and Google making new announcements for renewable energy projects.
Google’s total power usage sits at 30 Terawatt hours in 2025. One terwatt is one trillion watts. A US home on average uses about 1000 kilowatt hours, so Google is using the energy that 30 million homes would normally use.
But Google is no slouch, they mention they’ve almost maxed out their energy effectiveness - and that’s why they’re branching out to new sources of power.
One unique method is by way of nuclear fusion, Google invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and purchased half the output of the Fusion reactor that is planned to be completed in 2030. Although there are fusion reactor prototypes, if this project is completed it would be the first production fusion reactor in the world.
In 2024, Google announced a deal with Kairos power to generate 500Mw of power with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) - a smaller type of nuclear reactor that is similar to those found on nuclear submarines.
Meanwhile, Meta closed a new deal for a $10B AI Data Center housed in Northeast Lousiana, occupying 2,250 acres on a former farm site. It will be Meta’s largest data center to date and will focus on training AI models such as Meta’s Llama.
This data center is planned to consume so much power that Meta partnered with a local energy company to build three new gas power plants for $3B - planned to come online in 2028 or 2029. The energy demands could power up to 2 million homes.
Critics of Meta’s project point to lack of publicly available details - even with new gas plants the local customers may have to support the burden of Meta’s massive demands.
Tech giant Oracle is also searching for nuclear power sources for its data centers, securing building permits for SMRs. Again technology that has never been used in practice, and shouldn’t be expected until the turn of the next decade.
Microsoft is bringing back the Three Mile Island nuclear facility back from the dead, signing a 20 year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy, a company that runs over 20 US nuclear reactors and has another power deal with Meta.
Constellation CEO Joe Dominenguez saying the Three Mile Island facility is ahead of schedule and could be producing power for Microsoft within 2 years.
In a time where energy and water infrastructure fall short for people everywhere, it seems that big tech companies are able to shock the world into action.
All of these developments driven by big tech, mainly for the pursuit of AI?
Its clear there’s something bigger going on here, and now that big tech companies account for more than half 50% of renewable energy deals - they’re intimately tied with the future of the world’s energy - not to mention its water.
Hyperscale data centers take enormous amounts of water to keep them cool, it was revealed in a legal battle that Google data centers in Oregon consume more than 355 million gallons of water in 2021 - over one quarter of The Dalles’ annual water consumption.
Although Google’s environmental report boasts about their renewable energy metrics and efficiency, they make it hard to decipher how much water they actually use.
In 2023, Google consumed 24M cubic meters of water, Microsoft consumed almost 8M cubic meters, and Meta a 3M cubic meters. This water is siphoned off from housing city’s water supply, and even directly from natural acquifers and watersheds. A 2001 study “The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States” notes that 90% of U.S watersheds have been tapped - 20% of these from stressed watersheds in the Western U.S where droughts are common.
Protect Our Acquifer Memphis is an organization raising awareness about a local xAI data center, installed in one of the poorer parts of Memphis, TN. The local Memphis Sand Acquifer is critical to the well-being of the community and environment supplying houses, industry & agriculture, its one of the only metro areas that rely 100% on groundwater.
The acquifer naturally filters water through its sand - making it clean and high quality water, now destined to be wasted on cooling the xAI super computer. Its estimated that the data center will require up to 5 million gallons of water per day.
Pulling this amount of water will disturb the acquifer and risk pulling pollution from the shallower parts of the acquifer into the main acquifer.
Water is the source of all life, now under threat once again. These resources are not infinite, even though these companies pretend like they are. Big tech companies strategically exploit the poorest areas to build their projects, which end up hurting the local people and environment.
They demand massive amounts of power and water, for what? To make the latest version of your favorite chatbot a little smarter? To surpass human intelligence? Basic human intelligence would be enough to prevent this catastrpohe.
What’s really going on here? We can look to the words of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for guidance. In 2024 Ellison said during an investor meeting:
"We're going to have supervision," Ellison said. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."
We’re getting closer to a system where every Ring Doorbell, every Google Home, every big tech phone is feeding real-time data into a data center, so someone, somewhere can judge you for it.
These companies will starve the earth and its people of its natural resources for the sake of playing God.
One way to stop these data centers is to not feed them with data. We must quit big tech services and products and find alternatives as quickly as we can.
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