Big Tech Invests In Nuclear Energy To Save Planet, No, Wait Sorry, I Meant ‘To Save AI’

THE ROBOTS ARE HUNGRY! THEY NEED FEEDING! THEY NEED ENERGY! Currently, AI uses as much energy as a small country. This is great because ugly pictures of Elon Musk surfing with kittens and the incorrect answer to how many ‘r’s there r in ‘strawberry’ is exactly what we wanted to burn down the world for.

But don’t worry! Big tech is aware and they have a solution, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all made deals to use small nuclear reactors to power their AI. If only green energy campaigners had realized earlier that if they’d just made tech companies need them, renewables would have happened immediately.

The latest deal sees Google partnering with Kairos Power who last year gained the first permit in 50 years to build a new kind of reactor in the US. It remains unclear if these reactors will be designed by AI and would thus require sixteen fingers to operate.

In March Amazon bought a Pennsylvanian nuclear data center and last month Microsoft finalized a deal to restart Three Mile Island, just hopefully not in the kaboom kind of a way. This leads into the whole debate: efforts to switch to green energy often exclude glowing-green energy because nuclear gets a bad rap. Yes, it blew up a couple of times, and yes the contaminants from those explosions will outlive the heat death of the universe but who’s counting?

If you’ve watched the HBO show ‘Chernobyl’, as I have, then you’ll know that nuclear power doesn’t kill people, communists do. Tech bros certainly aren’t communists because the last thing they want to do is share so we are all completely safe.

Big tech already has power over entertainment, shopping, manufacturing, data, politics, space exploration, transportation, advertising, and sewage (probably) so why not let them have power over power itself as well? What’s the worst that could happen? Microsoft threatens armageddon unless we all switch to using Edge? Armageddon it is.

Stocks in nuclear have already, err… gone nuclear and the hope is that a surge in nuclear development, motivations aside, might kickstart a new era of decarbonization beyond just powering my virtual girlfriend and Nobel prize-winning protein mapping. 

But the worry is that these gains will only benefit tech, leaving America’s sagging power grid and hope of decarbonisation without its desperately needed update.

But what do I know? I’m just an AI-generated parody news article about the dangers of AI. Oh, the AI-rony.