While AI is extremely convenient on a day to day basis, there’s a huge problem with it. It uses way too much electricity.
Microsoft just agreed to buy power from a nuclear plant that’s been dead for five years. Not just any nuclear plant, but Three Mile Island, the site of America’s worst nuclear accident. That’s like buying electricity from Chernobyl. Microsoft was that hungry for power.
Why would they do something so extreme? Because AI is electricity hungry.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it started off an AI arms race. Every tech company started building huge AI systems. However, what most people don’t know is that these AI models need incredible amounts of power to run. We’re talking about electricity consumption that makes regular data centers look tiny.
The restart has now been quickened to 2027. This shows you just how urgent the power crunch has become. The deal will add over 800 megawatts of electricity to the grid and create 3,400 jobs but point to note is Microsoft is purchasing all of this power in what Constellation calls “the largest power purchase agreement that the nuclear plant operator has ever signed.”
Think about it this way. Your laptop might use 50 watts of power. A single AI training session can use as much electricity as a small town. When you multiply that across millions of users asking ChatGPT questions every day, the numbers get overwhelming.
So Microsoft looked around for power sources and realized that there isn’t enough electricity available. Solar and wind are great but AI needs power 24/7, even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. That means they need nuclear power. Data centers already consume around 415 terawatt hours annually, representing about 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024, and have been growing at 12% per year
However, most nuclear plants are old and are getting shut down. So Microsoft made a deal never done before: they’ll pay to restart a dead nuclear reactor just to feed their AI systems.
And this problem is just limited to Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and every other tech mammoth faces the same challenge. They’re all on a constant hunt for electricity, which means they’re driving up power costs for everyone else.
The bigger picture is that AI is forcing us to rebuild America’s power grid. Nuclear plants that were supposed to close forever are coming back online. New nuclear plants are being planned for the first time in decades.
This changes everything. AI isn’t limited to being a software anymore, it’s now an infrastructure crisis. The digital revolution is suddenly very physical. When tech companies are willing to restart nuclear reactors just to run their AI, you know we’ve entered a completely new era.
