No end is in sight for the demand for power hungry data centres, so Oracle's Larry Ellison said the enterprise technology giant intends to build facilities powered by nuclear reactors.
Ellison made the announcement in an Oracle earnings call with investors and analysts, saying the company is building a gigawatt capacity facility, which will be powered by three small modular reactors (SMRs). Large data centres typically use electricity in the hundreds of megawatt range and Oracle, which has 162 under construction is building an 800 MW facility.
Further details on the location of the nuclear powered data centre wasn't provided by Ellison, nor did he disclose which company would supply the reactors, which have already been permitted.
The world is currently experiencing a data centre boom that's driven by continuing demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. AI servers use graphics card technology based components that provide high performance at the cost of high energy use. Data centre builders and technology companies have to take not only the high power use of the servers into account, but also factor in cooling for them to dissipate the heat they produce.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is betting on nuclear, through his Terrapower company that recently started construction on an advanced facility in Wyoming, United States.
The Terrapower reactor will have 345 MW capacity, and use molten salt as energy storage - hence it's called Natrium.
Data centres and the networks used to connect them to users are consuming an increasingly large amount of the world's energy production, and other resources such as water and land as well.
New Zealand is also riding the data centre boom to an extent, with Microsoft, CDC, and Hawaiki Cable founder Remi Galasso and partners building facilities around the country. Amazon Web Services is also planning data centres in Auckland, although the cloud giant's plans, part of a $7.5 billion promised investment schedule in New Zealand, appear to have hit a snag and been put on hold.
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Amazon Web Services is also planning data centres in Auckland, although the cloud giant's plans, part of a "$7.5 billion promised investment schedule in New Zealand, appear to have hit a snag and been put on hold"
"The council says Amazon hasn’t resolved stormwater discharge problems, and accordingly, the consent application process has been put on hold."
Yet another Auckland development screwed by a lack of water services availability and so forced to plans that fail to manage the burden of the lack of infrastructure.
Its not that a single company or council cannot plan water services, build, repair or maintain them. In NZ the whole country fails at prioritizing essential infrastructure and human resources necessary for it. Even our architects get zero training so we have a repeated series of bad designs, and builds prone to leaks, flooding & community sewage overflows. New developments get stymied by the lack of essential water service availability & capacity and NZ ends up with a lack of business & housing infrastructure. Go team.
If only more kids learnt the lessons of babies first water toys and how pipes work. Then they might be able to predict as council & CCO managers that a blocked pipe will cause flooding and if you want more people living in an area with 10000 more homes you might want more capacity to extract the sewage made rather then wait for the eventual shit to hit the fan.
Looking at how Wellington and our govt dept heads manage things it probably would be a better investment to get them water toy lessons rather then language ones. Because water in and of itself has no mauri and any lifeforce in water; normally bacteria, viruses and disease needs to be filtered out to be safe to drink or for animals like humans and native species to interact with safely in the first place. Lessons learned over millennia of water systems design are still relevant rather then a watered down version of homeopathy & "natural" healing. Considering most advanced water systems design came from world wide developments it is not western, eastern, african or middle eastern but key lessons and innovations across all continents. The least notable developments were in the typical western American sense. So the assumption that more advanced water science and engineering is bad because it applies more technical skill then running sewage & filtered water through a marsh to restore a non existent feeling pandering to those without water systems skills or basic scientific knowledge seems very backward and harmful to all communities. The same mentally of "Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes"
But then NZ is heading more into the lets not stop flooding and spend more on above ground look and feel (that then gets flooded) rather then properly invest in below ground services & the growth needed for the population & business reqs. We truly are on the worst timeline.
Microsoft will have "New Zealand - North" data centre up and running with essential Azure services soon, they are looking at end of the year. It made their map recently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/globe/explore?info=region_newzealandn…
paywalled, but sounds like its coming...
Spark’s surf lagoon data centre in Dairy Flat gains resource consent
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sparks-surf-lagoon-data-centre-in-d…
Google supposed to be opening a GCP datacentre too, but that's gone all quite. No mention of it on their roadmap, which goes out to Q1 2026.
https://datacenternews.asia/story/google-cloud-to-open-first-cloud-regi…
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