Founder Larry Ellison says that the company will use three of them
Computing giant Oracle $ORCL (ORCL) unveiled quarterly earnings on Monday. Revenue was $13 billion, up 8% from a year ago; net income was $2.9 billion, up 23%. Though shares rose more than 11% after the report during Tuesday trading, the occasion revealed another eye-catching development from its founder Larry Ellison.
“We’re in the middle of designing a data center that’s north of a gigawatt,” he said on the company’s earnings call. “The location and the power place we’ve located, they’ve already got building permits for three nuclear reactors. These are the small modular nuclear reactors to power the data center. This is how crazy it’s getting. This is what’s going on.”
Artificial intelligence training models and the giant computer warehouses that run them and the rest of the internet are very expensive, electricity-wise. Arm Holdings (ARM) chief marketing officer Ami Badani said in April that data centers eat up 2% of all global energy needs. That number is almost certain to grow if the technology continues to become more widely adopted.
“We won’t be able to continue the advancements of AI without addressing power,” Badani said. “ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.”
In a report earlier this year on expected electricity demand, the International Energy Association said that data centers will make up a third of new energy needs in the U.S. through 2026 and more than double worldwide by 2026 to 1,000 terawatt-hours.
“This demand is roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan,” the IEA said. “Updated regulations and technological improvements, including on efficiency, will be crucial to moderate the surge in energy consumption.”
Oracle isn’t the only tech name getting into the nuclear energy game. Amazon $AMZN Web Services (AMZN) explored a deal to use some of it to power its data centers, and Microsoft $MSFT (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates has invested in the nuclear power firm TerraPower to help create more carbon-free energy generation.
-Britney Nguyen contributed to this article.
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