Oracle wants to power a new gigawatt data center with three small nuclear reactors – and it’s not the only big hyperscaler eyeing nuclear to meet surging AI energy demands

Oracle is set to power a new data center with upwards of 1 gigawatt (GW) capacity through nuclear energy, according to the firm’s CTO Larry Ellison.

Speaking during a recent earnings call, Ellison confirmed the cloud computing giant has “already got building permits” for three nuclear reactors – small modular reactors (SMRs) to be precise, which are theoretically cheaper to run owing to their size.

“This is how crazy it’s getting. This is what’s going on,” Ellison raved in response to an analyst question about the market’s move from AI training to AI inferencing.

Oracle’s nuclear plans form at least part of the firm’s forward-looking vision, with Ellison talking up the company’s huge data center portfolio and the accelerating power capacity of each site.

The firm has 162 data centers live and under construction across the globe, Ellison said, with the largest of these sites commanding 800 megawatts (MW) in power consumption and “acres” of Nvidia GPU clusters for AI development.

“That’s what’s required to stay competitive in the race to build one – just one – of the most powerful artificial neural networks in the world,” Ellison said.

“The stakes are high and the race goes on. Soon Oracle will begin construction of data centers that are more than a gigawatt,” he added, referring to the nuclear-powered data center.

Ellison also talked up some of the firm’s recent announcements at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, which saw the firm push towards the “multi-cloud era” via partnerships with AWS and Google Cloud.

Oracle is the latest to tap into nuclear

With data center power demands skyrocketing, nuclear power has become an attractive option for companies hoping to source larger amounts of energy whilst minimizing carbon emissions.

In April this year, for example, AWS announced plans to spend $650 million on a data center location situated next to the Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, capable of producing 2.5 GW.

A few months ago this move hit a snag, however, after several electricity providers hit out at the project over potential price hikes for taxpayers or problems with grid availability in the area.

More recently, Constellation Energy announced that it would be partnering up with Microsoft to reopen the infamous ‘Three Mile Island’ nuclear plant, over 40 years after one of the reactors suffered a partial meltdown.