Meta’s plans for an AI data center have been disrupted by an unusual culprit: rare bees.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant was in the process of striking a deal with the operator of a nuclear power plant that would have provided electricity for a new data center. However, the deal ran into environmental issues, according to At Financial Times.
Complicating matters is the presence of a rare species of bee found on the land where the project was supposed to be built, Zuckerberg said at a company meeting last week. FT reported.
The new data center was supposed to be dedicated to Meta’s new and ongoing artificial intelligence projects. Many tech companies, including Meta, are seeking carbon-free energy sources for their data centers as AI requires much more energy than previous computer forms. Nuclear energy is one of the most promising candidates for new green energy.
Meanwhile, the company’s data center needs as part of its AI push remain poorly met.
“Our compute needs currently exceed our available data center capacity,” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said on a July earnings call.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment and declined to comment at FT.
For AI developers, nuclear energy remains one of the most promising possibilities for energy. In the United States, nuclear energy is less favored than other forms of energy production. However, in recent years, the advent of AI and the desire to develop additional energy sources that can be carbon neutral have propelled nuclear power. get back into the conversation.
This led to a sort of nuclear bonanza among major tech companies, many of which have expressed interest in nuclear power to power their artificial intelligence ambitions.
Microsoft signed an agreement with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Three Mile Island was shut down in 1979 after a partial meltdown of one of its reactors, which remains the largest nuclear accident in U.S. history. Microsoft will purchase power from the restarted factory for 20 years. Constellation expects to spend $1.6 billion to restart the factory.
Constellation was also supposed to supply electricity to another Meta competitor on Amazon. However, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal to allow Amazon to use additional energy for one of its data centers. Amazon is also planning to invest in another version of the technology called small modular nuclear reactors. Last month, Google already secured several modular reactors when it signed an agreement with Kairos Power to purchase between six and seven reactors of this type.
Tech companies have been forced to turn to new sources of power for their AI research and development because it requires orders of magnitude greater than normal computing. Training for a large language model like GPT-3 uses about the same amount of energy as 130 American households. A single prompt on an AI chatbot can take up to 10 times as much power as a classic Google search.
Meta has invested huge sums to realize its AI ambitions. In the third quarter of this year, Meta made $9.2 billion in investments in “servers, data centers and network infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said during an earnings call last week.
Had the latter project not been halted, Meta would have been the first major tech company to have nuclear-powered AI, Zuckerberg told employees at the meeting. FT reported.