Stargate will use solar energy and batteries to power a $100 billion artificial intelligence project
The massive $100 billion Stargate joint venture will reportedly be powered, at least in part, by solar energy and batteries.
It will be renewable energy facilities It was built by SoftBank-backed SB Energyaccording to a report by Bloomberg, although it is unlikely to be the sole source of energy for the project. Stargate is a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Groupwhich promises to build a large number of new data centers to drive artificial intelligence applications.
The growth in cloud computing and artificial intelligence in recent years has sent developers and technology companies rushing to secure energy. The US Department of Energy predicts that data centers could be consumed As much as 12% of total energy produced in the United States by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023. Looming crisis could leave 50% of new data centers abandoned Weak by 2027.
Nuclear power has emerged as a darling of data center developers and technology companies. Google signed a 500 MW deal With the Kairos nuclear startup, Microsoft restarts One of the closed reactors On Three Mile Island. Data center operator Switch announced the agreement in December With okloa Sam Altman-backed small modular reactor company, with a capacity of 12 gigawatts.
But the recent history of nuclear power has been plagued by cost overruns and delays. The new crop of nuclear startups was founded largely to overcome those hurdles by designing reactor components and mass-producing them. If all goes as planned, this approach could speed up approvals and construction of new nuclear plants.
But despite the progress, none of the startups have completed a reactor yet, and their first commercial reactors are not expected to become operational until 2030, which does little to alleviate energy shortages in the near term. Natural gas power plants, another potential source for data centers, will take years to build.
Solar and wind farms are much faster to survive. Compared to nuclear power plants and natural gas plants, they can be completed in approx Half the timeaccording to a study conducted on power plant projects over a period of 50 years. More recent estimates indicate that the average time to complete a solar power plant is About 18 months. Because of its inherent modularity, it can start producing power before the bulk of the project is complete.
The longest part of any solar project is permitting and interconnection, when the facility is connected to the grid. For data centres, grid connections can be optional – many can get power directly from the source. Given the obvious urgency for Stargate, the permitting process could also be accelerated, making solar the front-runner for the first data centers.
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