In October 2024 the big three cloud-computing providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) have all stated their intention of operating nuclear power stations to power their servers. The growing need to meet the energy requirements of their high-energy-consumption AI systems, in particular, has meant that their earlier climate-change goals have largely been put on the back-burner. They are now reaching out to nuclear power suppliers, and in some cases, even restarting old nuclear power stations, under the 'green renewables' banner.

While these companies have renewables from wind and solar, nuclear power provides a means to consistently supply enough power for their future AI systems, whose power needs will be orders of magnitude larger than non-AI systems.  So much so that the current US grid will not cope with the projected power demand, without supplementing it with nuclear power.

At AtomJump, we believe that

• AI large-language-models, despite what has been claimed by the tech-giants who are pitching them, are unnecessary, inconsistent, and overly power-consuming
  
• Nuclear power for server usage is a dangerous (some may argue, reckless, step), simply for these unproven AI systems, which provide 'assistant' services that have a raft of social ramifications, both positive and negative, when this power usage could be better spent on helping humans deal with these real-world problems.
  
• There are better software and hardware options in providing lower-power consumption computing, in much the same manner as you might compare the technological feats of the America's Cup's yachts, versus the heavy-duty SpaceX rockets: we need to look for these streamlined alternatives. AtomJump itself is an open provider of such software and server hardware, and uses wind, solar and hydro-power, with ultra-low-energy servers.  We also provide links to other software that works off the 'US-cloud'. We need to think smaller, thinner, and more optimized, and not the other way around. And allow humans to do what they do best.
  
• Our servers are hosted in New Zealand's Nuclear Free Zone. While the law here does not prevent nuclear power stations from operating, it does prevent nuclear power ships from entering it's waters, bans the dumping of radioactive waste, and prevents nuclear weapon devices from being on it's land. Practically, there are no nuclear power stations in New Zealand.
• We would argue that servers hosted in other countries, powered by nuclear energy, should also be subject to a similar review on usage within New Zealand waters (and encourage a similar approach in other countries).
• We are currently in a technological hype-cycle in regards to AI, and the world's largest corporations have bet their entire existence on the predicted applications for AI.  But in most cases, as we have seen in previous hype-bubbles, the reality usually does not live up to the hype levels. Should we be risking the long-term safety of our planet (with nuclear power stations), to sustain these technology companies?