Nuclear trio-powered data center now being developed by Oracle

AI's rapidly increasing need for power is making data centers go nuclear, and Oracle might become the first name in the cloud industry to follow this path. According to its co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison, Oracle is working on a data center that will use no less than three small modular nuclear reactors. The first such reactor approved for use in the US received its certifications last year, although NuScale Power, the Oregon-based company behind it, started working on the design back in 2007.

"So we're in the middle of designing a data center that's north of the gigawatt that has -- but we found the location and the power place," said Ellison. He also added that Oracle already received the building permits for three nuclear reactors. Before reaching this topic of discussion, he also expressed his belief that over the next half-decade or even for an entire decade, there will be an ongoing battle for training highly specialized AI models. As an example, he mentioned image recognition of medical scans, where millions of biopsy slides would need to be processed so that AI-powered solutions would help recognize tumors and various other anomalies.

Although he unveiled the company's plans, Oracle's head also chose to keep the location of the data center and reactors a mystery for now. At this time, two small modular nuclear reactors are operational in the world, as per the Nuclear Energy Agency. In addition to the test reactor in Japan, China and Russia also operate one each. Last year, NuScale certified the first small modular nuclear reactor in the US, so it is most likely that Oracle will use this solution. For more information about it, those interested can grab the United States Office of Federal Register's NuScale Small Modular Reactor Design Certification: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 2023 print replica, available in Kindle format for $6.99 and paperback, priced at $9.99.