Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) have said that all options, including oil and gas, are on the table as tech giants continue to grapple with surging power demand by AI workloads. Energy and tech executives have gathered at the Hamm Institute for American Energy in Oklahoma City to discuss how the U.S. can meet the growing energy needs for AI data centers. Over the past decade, Big Tech companies have mostly invested in renewable power as they strive to cut their carbon dioxide emissions; however, they are now adopting a more pro-fossil fuel stance after the Trump administration ditched the country’s climate goals.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said. “We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term.”
The world is witnessing unprecedented electricity demand growth.
Last year, power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies published a report titled “The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over,” which pointed out that United States grid planners--utilities and regional transmission operators (RTOs)--had nearly doubled growth projections in their five-year demand forecasts. For the first time in decades, demand for electricity in the U.S. is projected to grow by as much as 15% over the next decade driven by the Artificial Intelligence (AI), clean energy manufacturing, and cryptocurrencies boom.
The International Energy Agency has projected that global data center electricity consumption will jump from 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 to 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026. According to Goldman Sachs, escalating electricity needs from running AI data centers will generate downstream investment opportunities that will benefit utilities, renewable energy generation, and industrial sectors.
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The investment bank has forecast that data center power demand will grow at 15% compound annual growth rate from 2023-2030, with data centers consuming 8% of total U.S. electricity output at the end of the forecast period compared to ~3% currently. Analysts estimate that ~47 GW of additional power generation capacity will be required to meet the growth in U.S. data center power demand by 2030. Similarly, Anthropic estimates that the U.S. will need 50 gigawatts of new power by 2027, equivalent to about 50 nuclear reactors. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark says AI demand will drive the development of “new and novel sources” of power over the longer term.
Surging power demand has also brought the nuclear sector back into play. The big nuclear rally kicked off last year after NuScale (NYSE:SMR) signed an agreement with Standard Power to supply the data center provider with small modular reactors (SMRs). Standard Power--a developer of modular data centers–will use NuScale Power's power solutions at two separate sites, where up to 12 SMRs (at each site) would be used to provide power for new data centers. Suddenly, the market took note of SMRs as a viable solution for data centers struggling to keep up with surging power demands by artificial intelligence (AI) computing.
The long-term outlook for the nuclear sector remains bullish, with nuclear power expected to meet surging AI demand and lower greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency has projected that global data center electricity consumption will jump from 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 to 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026.
According to Goldman Sachs, escalating electricity needs from running AI data centers will generate downstream investment opportunities that will benefit utilities, renewable energy generation, and industrial sectors. The investment bank has forecast that data center power demand will grow at 15% compound annual growth rate from 2023-2030, with data centers consuming 8% of total U.S. electricity output at the end of the forecast period compared to ~3% currently. Analysts estimate that ~47 GW of additional power generation capacity will be required to meet the growth in U.S. data center power demand by 2030.
Last year, 34 countries, including the U.S., pledged to increasingly deploy nuclear power to lower their reliance on fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) report Electricity 2024, nuclear power generation is forecast to reach an all-time high globally in 2025, exceeding the previous record set in 2021 as new reactors begin commercial operations in multiple markets, including China, India, South Korea, and Europe; output from France climbs and several plants in Japan are restarted.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
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