Developers of new types of small nuclear reactors and battery chemistries are honing plans to profit by targeting data centers, which need more and more energy to fuel the AI boom.“It’s a unique time and a unique situation,” Scott, chief commercial officer for NuScale Power, which is commercializing small-scale nuclear systems, toldin overall data center power needs, estimated that ChatGPT queries need nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google searches. Pair that with the reality that the U.
“They're so heat dense and so power dense, they’re up in the range of 70 to 80 kilowatts per rack. And there’s talk that’s going to go up to 100 kilowatts really soon,” Shehabi said. “It's basically 10 times higher than servers used in the past.” Radiant has raised $60 million of venture capital, led by Andreessen Horowitz, and wants to start delivering commercial units late this decade – assuming testing at Idaho National Laboratory goes well.
“If you wanted to set up a data center on the edge or in a microgrid, it may be very suitable for that.”. Late last year, Google began testing Fervo’s system – it uses a horizontal drilling technique to tap into underground geothermal reservoirs of hot water to power generators – in Nevada that may be used for a data center.