Larry Ellison of Oracle predicts that his company’s data centers will soon exceed the 1 GW mark. In the future, he wants to supply them with energy himself via modular nuclear reactors.

Today, Oracle has 162 cloud data centers to support its OCI services. The largest currently has a capacity of 800 MW. However, like other cloud providers, Oracle wants to accommodate increasingly powerful servers in its data centers. AI servers in particular consume a lot of energy.

Founder and CTO Larry Ellison predicts that the first data center with a capacity of more than 1 GW is just around the corner. According to him, Oracle has received approval to operate such a data center with three so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

Energy problem

Today, data centers mainly use energy from the public grid, although most cloud giants try to contribute with solar panels, for example. In practice, however, they place a heavy burden on the grid due to the huge concentration of electricity demand. This is partly at the expense of available green energy for private individuals, leading to protests.

To support the growth of data centers, the available energy must grow with it. Ideally, this does not lead to increasing CO2 emissions. After all, almost all large companies have committed to reducing their emissions to limit their impact on the global climate. Oracle is no exception.

Good idea (theoretically)

With SMRs, Ellison can theoretically ensure that the huge data centers run CO2-free without impacting the public power grid.

However, there are practical objections between dream and reality. SMRs have been attracting a lot of attention for quite some time. An SMR is a miniature nuclear reactor that can be compared to what you would find in a nuclear submarine. The purpose of an SMR is to build such a reactor in mass production. This should reduce the cost of the small, safe reactors. In addition, they require little special infrastructure.

In practice, SMRs are currently mainly an idea; such reactors do not yet exist. Pilot projects also show that scaling up SMRs to financially viable mass production is not so easy.

Future plan

It is therefore unclear when Oracle will build its gigawatt data centers and when they will be powered by SMRs. Ellison’s plan appears to be medium-term and is unlikely to bear fruit this decade.

However, the idea is interesting: the growing demand for data center capacity driven by AI is currently affecting the environmental goals of cloud providers and is having a very negative impact on the climate.