abhibeckert , (edited )

Yeah I call bullshit on that. I get why they're investing money in it, but this is a moonshot and I'm sure they don't expect it to succeed.

These data centers can be built almost anywhere in the world. And there are places with very predictable weather patterns making solar/wind/hydro/etc extremely cheap compared to nuclear.

Nuclear power is so expensive, that it makes far more sense to build an entire solar farm and an entire wind farm, both capable of providing enough power to run the data center on their own in overcast conditions or moderate wind.

If you pick a good location, that's lkely to work out to running off your own power 95% of the time and selling power to the grid something like 75% of the time. The 5% when you can't run off your own power... no wind at night is rare in a good location and almost unheard of in thick cloud cover, well you'd just draw power from the grid. Power produced by other data centers that are producing excess solar or wind power right now.

In the extremely rare disruption where power wouldn't be available even from the grid... then you just shift your workload to another continent for an hour or so. Hardly anyone would notice an extra tenth of a second of latency.

Maybe I'm wrong and nuclear power will be 10x cheaper one day. But so far it's heading the other direction, about 10x more expensive than it was just a decade ago, thanks to incidents like Fukushima and that tiny radioactive capsule lost in Western Australia proving current nuclear safety standards, even in some of the safest countries in the world, are just not good enough. Forcing the industry to take additional measures (additional costs) going forward.

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