UK needs more nuclear to power AI, says Amazon Web Services boss

The UK needs more nuclear energy to power the data centres needed for artificial intelligence (AI), the boss of the world’s largest cloud computing company has said.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is part of the retail giant Amazon, plans to spend £8bn on new data centres in the UK over the next four years.

A data centre is a warehouse filled with computers that remotely power services such as AI, data processing, and streaming, but a single one can use the same amount of energy as a small town.

Matt Garman, chief executive of AWS, told the BBC nuclear is a “great solution” to data centres’ energy needs as “an excellent source of zero carbon, 24/7 power”.

AWS is the single largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world and has funded more than 40 renewable solar and wind farm projects in the UK.

The UK’s 500 data centres currently consume 2.5% of all electricity in the UK, while Ireland’s 80 hoover up 21% of the country’s total power, with those numbers projected to hit 6% and 30% respectively by 2030.

The body that runs the UK’s power grid estimates that by 2050 data centres alone will use nearly as much energy as all industrial users consume today.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Matt Garman said that future energy needs were central to AWS planning process.

“It’s something we plan many years out,” he said.

“We invest ahead. I think the world is going to have to build new technologies. I believe nuclear is a big part of that particularly as we look 10 years out.”

French company EDF is currently building a giant new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset and a decision to build another one at Sizewell in Suffolk is pending. EDF’s UK Chair Alex Chisholm unsurprisingly agrees with Mr Garman.

“Why are data centre providers turning to nuclear? They will need a lot of energy, reliably,” Mr Chisholm told the BBC.

“Replication of Hinkley Point C, alongside the roll out of SMRs, can power Britain’s digital economy.”

SMRs refers to small modular reactors which are the size of a football stadium as opposed to the size of a whole town, like Sizewell or Hinkley.

Amazon is already partnering with SMR firms in Washington and Virginia to develop SMRs and would be a natural customer for Rolls Royce which is developing its own SMR designs here.

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero told the BBC that modular reactors “will play a particularly important roles in growing energy-hungry sectors like AI and we’re shaking up the planning rules to make it easier to build nuclear power stations across the country”

But this technology is many years away and new grid connections already take years to establish.

Jess Ralston at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said: “Investors can be waiting years for grid connections holding back growth.”

“Nuclear could be a way of supply data centre’s power needs, but hardly any SMRs have been built anywhere in the world and traditional nuclear remains very expensive and takes a long time to build. So, it may be a while, if ever, for this to be a viable solution”.

AWS estimates that 52% of businesses are using AI in some way – with a new business adopting it at a rate of one a minute. Mr Garman said this is a good thing.

“AI is one of the most transformative technologies since the internet. It’s going to have a significant effect on almost every part of our lives.”

He said he understands why many are nervous.

“With any technology that is sufficiently new or hard to understand, people are probably appropriately scared of it initially, until they better understand it so that initial response is not particularly surprising.”

He added that he “would caution against” international regulation.

“The technology is moving at such a rate that I don’t believe there’s the knowledge of the folks that are building those regulations are going to be able to keep up.

“I think the most likely case is that those regulations would accomplish the exact inverse thing they are trying to do.”

However, he admitted he thinks a lot about the responsibility of releasing AI into the world.

“Anytime you’re building that much of a transformational technology, its important to think about those controls and guardrails so that it can go towards the betterment of society not the detriment.

“So absolutely. I think a ton about that, for sure.”