Nuclear Energy

US computer technology company Oracle wants to power a new data centre through nuclear energy, according to the firm’s chief technology officer Larry Ellison.

Speaking during a recent earnings call, Ellison confirmed the cloud computing giant has “already got building permits” for three small modular reactors, without giving details.

Ellison highlighted the complexity and scale of the projects Oracle has under development, saying, “We’re in the middle of designing a data centre that’s north of a gigawatt. We found the location and the power source.

“We’ve looked at it, they’ve already got building permits for three nuclear reactors. These are the small modular nuclear reactors to power the data centre”.

Ellison gave no details of a location and timeline for the project.

With data centre power demands skyrocketing, nuclear power has become an attractive option for companies hoping to source larger amounts of energy whilst minimising carbon emissions.

In April this year, Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online retail giant founded by Jeff Bezos, acquired US power producer Talen Energy’s Cumulus data centre campus at the Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.

AWS, which provides cloud computing platforms, aims to develop a 960 MW data centre campus on the site, which gets its power from the Susquehanna nuclear station.

Last week, US-based utility Constellation Energy announced the signing of a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, a 20-year deal that will also see the restart the long-shuttered Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.

Constellation said the tech company wants to use energy from the nuclear plant to fill the power consumption of its data centres with carbon-free sources.