As the push to use nuclear power to meet the massive electrical demands of AI-driven data centers accelerates, both Meta and Amazon have run into roadblocks that have stymied their plans for two locations.
Mother Nature took a hand in thwarting Meta’s project to build an AI data center near an unnamed nuclear facility, the Financial Times earlier this year, Zuckerberg spoke about energy bottlenecks (beginning at timestamp 25:30) and the regulatory challenges involved in powering facilities. This latest development will be viewed as yet another bump in the road.
Amazon’s problems are more mundane: the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) connect directly to the power plant, bypassing the transmission grid, and regulators said that PJM had not provided sufficient justification for the amendment to the interconnection service agreement (ISA) allowing the increased power. FERC held a technical conference on Nov. 1 to discuss the co-location issue in the face of concerns about having adequate power to feed the grid when co-located facilities were slurping up vast amounts of electricity. There were worries that the transmission grid doesn’t even have the capacity to carry all of the power necessary to fuel needs, and that the co-located facilities would not be contributing to upgrading it. This, FERC argued, could threaten the reliability of the grid and lead to higher electricity rates.
Despite this setback, Bloomberg has reported that Amazon remains committed to the project.
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