Meta’s plans for an AI data center were disrupted by an unusual culprit—rare bees.
The tech giant helmed by Mark Zuckerberg was in the process of hammering out 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 the Financial Times.
The presence of a rare species of bees found on the land where the project was supposed to be built complicated matters, Zuckerberg said at a company meeting last week, the FT reported.
The new data center was supposed to have been dedicated toward Meta’s new and ongoing artificial intelligence projects. Many tech companies, including Meta, have been looking for carbon-free sources of power for their data centers because AI requires far more energy than previous forms of computing. One of the most promising candidates of new green energy is nuclear power.
Meanwhile, the company’s needs for data centers amid its AI push remain underserved.
“Our compute needs outstrip our available data center capacity right now,” Meta CFO Susan Li said during a July earnings call.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment and declined to comment to the FT.
For AI developers, nuclear power remains one of the more promising possibilities for energy. In the U.S., nuclear power is less favored than other forms of energy production. However, in recent years the advent of AI and the push to develop additional sources of energy that can be carbon neutral thrust nuclear power back into the conversation.
That’s led to something of a nuclear bonanza among Big Tech companies, many of which have expressed interest in nuclear power to fuel their artificial intelligence ambitions.
Microsoft signed a deal 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 in one of its reactors that remains the most significant nuclear accident in U.S. History. Microsoft will buy energy from the rebooted plant for 20 years. Constellation expects to spend $1.6 billion to get the plant back up and running.
Constellation was also supposed to provide power to another Meta competitor in Amazon. However, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal to allow Amazon to draw additional power 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 of its own when it signed a deal with Kairos Power to purchase between six and seven such reactors.
Tech companies have been forced to look to new sources of energy for their AI research and development because it requires orders of magnitude more power than normal computing. Training for a large language model like GPT-3 uses roughly the same amount of energy as 130 U.S. Homes. A single prompt on an AI chatbot can take up to 10 times as much power as a regular Google search.
Meta has invested huge amounts into powering its AI ambitions. In the third quarter of this year, Meta invested $9.2 billion of capex on “servers, data centers and network infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said on an earnings call last week.
Had this latest project not been interrupted, Meta would have been the first major tech firm to have nuclear-powered AI, Zuckerberg told employees at the meeting, the FT reported.