👉 Background: Every time you browse the web, catch up on the latest TikTok trend or binge-stream Monsters, this is powered by data centres. Over the past few years, Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have pledged to be emissions-free by 2030.

👉 What happened: Until the explosion of AI services, these Big Tech players had a path to become emission free. But with AI guzzling energy, tech giants are realising that going green just got a whole lot harder. So Big Tech have all made a quick dash to go nuclear.

👉 What else: Over the past month, we've seen major investments in nuclear energy by Big Tech companies:

• Amazon has led a $500 million capital raise in a nuclear energy developer
  
• Google has ordered nuclear reactors for its data centres from a nuclear energy startup
  
• Microsoft has agreed a 20-year power purchasing deal with Constellation Energy to re-open a closed nuclear power plant
  

All part of their plan to have their AI cake.. And eat it too.

What's the key learning?

💡Big Tech has started warming up to nuclear power - even before some governments. Get this: an AI query consumes up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search so it's effectively become 10 times harder to become emissions free.

💡This means that using wind and solar energy alone won’t be enough to get these tech companies to become emission-free. But, nuclear plants don’t come cheap — it costs $1 billion USD just for a small modular reactor and they’re slow to build too. And there's always the question of safety.

💡But tech companies aren’t alone in pushing nuclear energy. While previously governments were against building nuclear plants because of safety and environmental concerns, the US government now sees nuclear power as critical to its goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.