The growing demand for power-hungry AI data centers has executives at Canadian uranium mine Cameco glowing with anticipation.
Future data centers may have built-in nuclear reactors | BBC News
Speaking on the resource company's first-quarter 2024 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Timothy Gitzel indicated the compute-intensive nature of AI workloads, and the challenges of getting enough power for the data centers where they operate, will drive sales of uranium for use as nuclear fuel.
Data center power requirements are expected to increase significantly over the next few years. An International Energy Agency report [PDF] from earlier this year found that global data center energy consumption was on track to nearly double from 460 TWh in 2022 to just over 800 TWh in 2026.
This trend has sparked renewed interest in nuclear power plants and reactor technology, as the cloud and hyperscalers leading the AI boom struggle to secure enough power and other resources to support their growing infrastructure while sticking to their sustainability and net zero commitments.
