Nectar for Mark Zuckerberg’s competitors! Meta wanted to create a data center AI powered by nuclear energy, as most other GAFAMs have already done. A project thwarted by the discovery of a rare and protected species of bee on the land intended for this data center, according to information from the Financial Times.
A major blow for the Palo Alto-based firm, its competitors Microsoft, Amazon and Google have recently signed agreements with nuclear power plant operators to meet the growing demand for energy in data centers dedicated to the development and operation of new, energy-intensive machine learning models.
A textual query addressed to a system such as ChatGPT consumes up to 10 times more energy than a simple Google search, says the American newspaper.
The great nuclear race
Had the deal gone through, Meta would have been the first Big Tech group to use nuclear-powered AI, Mark Zuckerberg lamented at an internal meeting. According to a study published last year, machine learning could consume almost 4% of global electricity by 2030.
Against this backdrop of the AI industry’s development against the backdrop of global warming, Google will shortly be switching on its own nuclear power plants. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the big tech nuclear race!