Meta stung by bees. Nuclear dreams must be hidden
Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has had to put on hold ambitious plans to build a nuclear-powered data center. Reason? Discovery of a rare species of bees in the area of a planned investment in the United States.
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The bees are stinging Meta’s plans: AI without the atom
As reported Financial Timesthe find presented an unforeseen obstacle for Meta, which wanted to work with the nuclear power plant operator to provide carbon-free energy for its next leap in artificial intelligence.
The social media giant is not the only company that is looking for the missing energy for artificial intelligence in the atom. Microsoft is restarting a nuclear reactor that has already caused a disaster, Oracle already has a permit for small reactors, and Google also announced that it will join this nuclear group in October. This time, however, Meta had to be polite.
During a meeting with employees last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that despite its readiness to use nuclear energy, the bee discovery had raised too many regulatory hurdles. And although Zuckerberg was supposed to be the first with nuclear AI, now he must think about where and whether he will resume his plans at all.
Why do they need so much energy?
Meta’s CFO said their computing needs have already exceeded available data center capacity and another $9.2 billion in investment in server rooms and data centers has been announced. Just training a large language model like GPT-3 consumes so much energy 130 US homes in a year. In contrast, a single AI chatbot response can use up to 10 times more energy than a standard Google search.
Now, when ChatGPT has the ambition to replace Google’s search engine, and Google has started introducing its voice chat into the search engine, Big Tech’s energetic appetite seems to have no end.
