Commentary highlighted emergence of nuclear power as energy source for data center infrastructure.

Over the past few years, the discussion around energy consumption in the data center industry has continued to increase, but there has been a substantial shift in technology over the past year which has increased the urgency in the conversation around renewable and clean energy. Bill Kleyman, Executive Vice President of Digital Solutions at Switch, singles out nuclear power as a potential game-changer that's gaining favor in addressing this challenge. The underlying thesis that drives this urgency is stark: the pace of our technological evolution is quickly becoming unsustainable.

The scale of this challenge becomes apparent when examining recent hardware shipment data. According to research firm Omdia, in the second quarter of 2023, Nvidia shipped over 900 tons (1.8 million pounds) of H100 compute GPUs for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing use cases. This shift in measurement—from units sold to weight—underscores the magnitude of the deployment. Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Data Centers, performed back-of-the-napkin calculations on this data, concluding that if you bring all these GPUs online at once, it would consume over 30 GW of power.

The energy infrastructure simply cannot currently accommodate this demand. When posed the question of which market can provide this much clean energy for AI use cases, utility providers acknowledged a stark reality: they would have to bring up coal-powered energy plants to support these new use cases. This creates a fundamental paradox where we must leverage fossil fuels to power some of the most advanced technologies in the world—a situation that demands urgent attention and innovation in clean energy solutions for the data center industry.