Emerging technologies are pushing energy demand to new heights

Microsoft is betting on nuclear power, aka the holy grail of energy production, to meet the company’s rapidly growing energy needs as it expands further into AI and supercomputing.

The tech giant recently announced agreements to buy electricity from existing nuclear fission plants to power its data centers, each of which can use as much energy as hundreds of thousands of individual homes.

• Microsoft is also investing in a next-gen nuclear fusion project from Sam Altman-backed startup Helion Energy, which plans to start supplying 50 megawatts of electricity – enough to power 50,000 homes – to Microsoft’s data centers by 2028.

The tech industry’s demand for energy has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. The culprit? Power-hungry emerging technologies like crypto, AI, and electric vehicles. For reference, recent peer-reviewed research estimates that AI data centers and servers will consume up to 134 terawatt-hours of energy – more than the energy needs of Argentina’s 46 million residents (or 0.5% of global demand) – by 2027 in a middle-ground scenario.

👀 Looking ahead… To meet a projected increase in energy demand over the coming years, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants have invested in thousands of mostly green-energy projects – and a majority of these are expected to come online in the next three years, per CNBC.