Amazon’s cloud computing company has bought a nuclear-powered hyperscale data centre campus in the US as it looks to square its ever-increasing energy demands with net zero targets.
Talen Energy Corp said this week that it had sold the Cumulus campus in the US state of Pennsylvania to Amazon Web Services.
Talen has been building the 1,200-acre campus next to a nearby nuclear plant it owns – the 2.5GW Susquehanna Steam Electric Station.
The campus will receive power directly from the nuclear plant, as opposed to via the national grid, which Talen says gives it significant “competitive advantages”.
The campus could use up to 960MW of power when it is fully built.
AWS, which is paying $350m up front for the campus and $300m at a later date, will buy electricity under a power purchase agreement.
Tech giants such as AWS are increasingly targeting zero carbon energy from renewables and nuclear as they look to decarbonise their operations, which include the increasing use of energy-guzzling artificial intelligence.
Amazon says it is on a path to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
In 2021, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta’s datacentres together used 72TWh of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. That number more than doubled since 2017.
Online retail behemoth Amazon recently retained its crown as the largest private buyer of renewable energy – snapping up 8.8GW of clean energy capacity across 16 countries.
