Many of these companies are very interested in small nuclear tech as a means to power these facilities. The major bottleneck now for most of them is finding sites where grid capacity exists to power them.

Talking to anyone in the space for more than 30 minutes and nuclear with come up.

I very much hope the hype cycle lasts long enough for some of this capital raining down from the sky to get these reactors deployed in the field, because those will be a lasting positive from this hype cycle - much like laying railroad infrastructure and fiber optic cables came from other hype cycles.

I've often said that the robber barons sucked, but at least they left massive amounts of physical infrastructure for the average person to benefit from. The hype cycles of late leave very little in comparison.

> I just wish we forced every new data center to be built with renewables or something.

Already the case in Europe. And in the US, most of the biggest player are doing this: Google, Microsoft, Meta, AWS. By now those 4 are the largest buyers of renewable purchase agreement in the entire world. MS alone invested something like 20B in renewable purchase.

But the issue is that installation of renewable in the US is not bottlenecked by lack of demand, it's bottlenecked by permitting, zoning issue etc. The queue for power deployment right now is something like 100GW (i.e. how much production is paid to be built, but not yet built), that is around 10% of the current total US power capacity. So it's not really clear to me if buying more renewables helps making it's deployment faster through economies of scale, or if the purchase order is just sitting in a queue for years and years.

One notable exception is xAI/Grok, who has one of the biggest cluster, is powering it 100% with gas and afaik did not offset it by buying the equivalent in renewable. Having built the cluster in a what was a washing machine factory that does not have adequate power supply or cooling tech, they have been rolling in 35 mobile gas turbines (large trailer trucks that you connect to gas pipes) and 50+ refrigeration trucks. IMHO, it should be illegal to build such an energy consuming system with such a poor efficiency, but well.

At least in the US, it doesn't need to be forced. In 2024 94% of new US powerplant capacity in the US were renewables or battery storage, we're on track for 93% for 2025, and based on announced plans the next few years will see very similar numbers. What few fossil fuel power plants are being built are exclusively natural gas, and a decent number of them are conversions of former coal plants to natural gas. Planned additional natural gas plant capacity is lower than at any point since the shale revolution started. Renewables have won.

Data centers want firm power to avoid underutilizing expensive assets. Solar and wind are intermittent. New gas has a years-long lead out. 12+ hours of batteries (solar in winter) are, in fact, not free or de minimis.

I wish the hardware itself were renewable too.

These companies would all LOVE to use small modular nuclear reactors in their datacenters... if the NRC ever got around to approving a license for one.

Why renewables? These guys don't have an energy problem. The states have made sure give them energy credits and other assurances on that. The problem they do have though is siphoning the water from everyone around them.

Microsoft actually has a design for mini datacenters that stay cool in the ocean and collect tidal energy. But it's way more fun to have states trying to court you into building datacenters cause it'll bring some jobs.