Amazon goes nuclear with atom-powered hyperscale facility
Huge 1,200-acre data centre campus will receive power directly from nearby nuclear plant
Amazon’s cloud computing company has bought a nuclear-powered hyperscale data centre campus in the US as it looks to square its ever-increasing energy demands with net zero targets.
Talen Energy Corp said this week that it had sold the Cumulus campus in the US state of Pennsylvania to Amazon Web Services.
Talen has been building the 1,200-acre campus next to a nearby nuclear plant it owns – the 2.5GW Susquehanna Steam Electric Station.
The campus will receive power directly from the nuclear plant, as opposed to via the national grid, which Talen says gives it significant “competitive advantages”.
The campus could use up to 960MW of power when it is fully built.
AWS, which is paying $350m up front for the campus and $300m at a later date, will buy electricity under a power purchase agreement.
Amazon says it is on a path to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
In 2021, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta’s datacentres together used 72TWh of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. That number more than doubled since 2017.