The head of Amazon’s cloud business has called on the United Kingdom to increase its supply of nuclear energy for data centres.
In an interview with the BBC, AWS chief executive Matt Garman reportedly said that nuclear is a “great solution” to data centres’ energy needs as “an excellent source of zero carbon, 24/7 power.”
It comes after a report from International Energy Agency (IEA) last month had warned AI was set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres.
Image credit Amazon
UK investment
Amazon it should be remembered had in September 2024 made a huge AWS investment in the United Kingdom.
It was announced last September that “Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to invest £8 billion over the next five years (2024-2028) building, operating, and maintaining data centres in the UK.”
That same month, the UK government had designated data centres in the UK as critical national infrastructure (CNI), highlighting the strategic importance of these facilities.
AWS is also building new data centres in other countries and regions.
The September announcement came after AWS in March 2022 had said it would invest “more than £1.8 billion in the next two years building and operating data centres in the UK in order to meet the growing needs of our customers and to help strengthen the UK’s digital infrastructure.”
AWS is not the only big tech and cloud service provider investing in the UK.
In November 2023 under the then Conservative government, Microsoft made its single largest investment in its forty-year history in the UK, pledging to spend £2.5 billion over the next three years to expand its next generation AI data centre infrastructure
In January 2024 Alphabet’s Google said it would a make a further $1 billion (£790m) investment to build a new data centre, just north of London.
Nuclear power
The United Kingdom meanwhile has already made a remarkable transition to renewable power generation in the past decade, with nuclear power stations acting as an power generation foundation.
The UK already has a number of nuclear power stations, and French company EDF is currently building a giant new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
Aa decision to build another nuclear power station at Sizewell in Suffolk is pending.
In the interview with the BBC, AWS head Matt Garman reportedly said that future energy needs were central to AWS planning process.
“It’s something we plan many years out,” he reportedly said.
“We invest ahead. I think the world is going to have to build new technologies. I believe nuclear is a big part of that particularly as we look 10 years out.”
AWS estimates that 52 percent of businesses are using AI in some way – with a new business adopting it at a rate of one a minute. Garman said this is a good thing.
“AI is one of the most transformative technologies since the internet. It’s going to have a significant effect on almost every part of our lives,” he reportedly said.
Renewable energy
The BBC also noted that AWS is the single largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world and has funded more than 40 renewable solar and wind farm projects in the UK.
The UK’s 500 data centres currently consume 2.5 percent of all electricity in the UK, while Ireland’s 80 hoover up 21 percent of the country’s total power, with those numbers projected to hit 6 and 30 percent respectively by 2030, the BBC reported.
The body that runs the UK’s power grid estimates that by 2050 data centres alone will use nearly as much energy as all industrial users consume today.
There have been some interesting developments in nuclear technology in recent years, most notably around small modular reactors.
Image credit Amazon
Recently the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) approved a request from Ontario-based Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to build a single small modular reactor (SMR), which will be the first such license issued in Canada.
