UK needs more nuclear to power AI, says Amazon Web Services boss

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewd5014wpno

Posted by Make_the_music_stop

14 comments
  1. “The UK’s 500 data centres currently consume 2.5% of all electricity in the UK, while Ireland’s 80 hoover up 21% of the country’s total power, with those numbers projected to hit 6% and 30% respectively by 2030.

    The body that runs the UK’s power grid estimates that by 2050 data centres alone will use nearly as much energy as all industrial users consume today.”

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  3. “UK needs more nuclear power”

    Yep

    “For AI”

    Nah

    “Says AWS’ boss”

    Hell nah.

  4. Pretty much every bit of research going shows that nuclear is more expensive than renewables such as solar or wind.

    There are other roles that nuclear plays, with balancing and managing spikes and troughs, but battery and storage can play those roles.

    I’d wager that there may be a short to medium term role for nuclear but longer term there’s better cheaper less damaging options.

  5. I read somewhere that an AI request uses 300 times more energy than a simple Google.

  6. Need the SMR selection process finished asap, this will be great for UK business and prosperity

  7. Fuck AWS… overpriced bullshit.

    Back in 2018 we had a contract with NHSE for private cloud supporting a service for the NHS, £160-£180k monthly cost. Some fucking moron at the top decided we need to be internet first and AWS is the way to go.

    Costs spiked up to £260-£300k monthly for that service in AWS compared to what we were charging previously.

    All of this you could track as NHSE used to publish their spending on a quarterly basis. But they’ve stopped doing that in the past few years.

    I actually had our MP at the door the other day and was explaining it to him. Hopefully he takes it on board.

  8. If Amazon want to invest in the power for their AI servers, go for it.

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