AI craves electricity

Why Amazon is pumping hundreds of millions into nuclear power

AI-generated symbol image: A lot of energy was used for this almost photorealistic image of a nuclear power plant.(Bild: KI-generiert – stock.adobe.com/Ben)

The US IT giant Amazon is investing 650 million US dollars in a nuclear power plant. In the US state of Pennsylvania, it is allowed to build a new data center right next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, which is subsidized in this way. The power plant operator is happy about the fresh money in its clammy coffers, Amazon about ten years of cheap electricity at a fixed price. But Amazon is not just concerned with costs.

AI models trained with huge amounts of data, which generate texts, images and videos based on the training data, have triggered a real AI hype. Google and the Microsoft-backed US start-up OpenAI in particular have made headlines in recent months with their Gemini and ChatGPT offerings, but Amazon's cloud division AWS is also working on its own AI algorithms in their slipstream.