Regulators Deal New Blows to Amazon and Meta's Nuclear Energy Aspirations.

Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have heavily invested in nuclear energy to ensure the electrical supply for their data centers, in response to the increased energy consumption driven by artificial intelligence and cloud computing. However, Amazon and Meta faced setbacks last week that thwarted their plans to find quick solutions to their energy needs. In contrast, Microsoft’s projects to revitalize a reactor at Three Mile Island continue to move forward.

Interestingly, the obstacles are not directly related to nuclear energy, but rather reflect the difficulty of establishing large data centers without having secured new sources of electricity beforehand. Meta, for example, intends to build an artificial intelligence data center near an already operational nuclear plant. However, during the project development, regulatory complications began to arise. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a general meeting that one of the challenges stemmed from the presence of a rare bee species on the site.

For its part, Amazon has also encountered difficulties. The company plans to construct a new large-scale data center next to the nuclear plant near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, taking advantage of a considerable portion of the plant's electricity. However, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees electric and natural gas networks in the U.S., voted against expanding an existing agreement that allowed Amazon to connect directly to the plant. The concern was that other customers might experience reduced reliability and face higher costs, as the data center would divert a significant portion of the electricity from the power plant to the rest of the regional power grid.

This will not be FERC's last encounter with the issue of electrical supply for large-scale data centers, as the commission has at least eight more large co-location requests to review.