Meta's plan for nuclear datacenter reportedly undone by bees

Environmental and regulatory obstacles led to the cancellation of an AI bit farm, report claims

Meta's plan to build a nuclear-powered datacenter for AI workloads has been undone by bugs, specifically bees.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees at an all-hands meeting that the discovery of a rare species of bees on the prospective build site had contributed to the cancellation of the datacenter project, according to The Financial Times.

Meta is said to have been negotiating a deal with the operator of an existing nuclear power plant for emissions-free electricity to sustain a new AI-focused datacenter. But according to two sources cited in the report, environmental and regulatory hurdles stymied the deal.

The report did not identify where the nixed datacenter site would have been located.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a clean energy research group, in 2018 launched a Power-In-Pollinators initiative to encourage energy companies to accommodate pollinators like bees and butterflies. Pollinators support agriculture and food production, so it's a bad look to kill them off for the sake of chatbots and AI-generated social media filler.

Related projects have focused on habitat restoration at former nuclear sites. The EPRI Pollinator Stewardship Dashboard currently lists 295 sites operated by 19 participating energy firms that support pollinators.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Amazon also has encountered obstacles in its effort to secure nuclear power for its datacenters.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Friday issued an order that rejected a revised Interconnection Service Agreement (ISA) that aimed to provide more power to the Cumulus datacenter operated by Talen Energy.

Rivals American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon in June filed an objection on the ground that the proposed agreement with regional power grid operator PJM Interconnection would favor Talen at their expense.

AI workloads require a tremendous amount of energy, so much so that the AI hyperscalers in the US have turned to nuclear power as a way to meet the increasing demand for energy production without burning fossil fuels.

Microsoft in September struck a 20-year deal to purchase power from the idle Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which would be operated under a name with less historical baggage, Crane Clean Energy Center, by Constellation Energy.

Google last month announced a deal with Kairos Power to purchase energy produced by small modular reactors (SMRs). Oracle meanwhile said it had obtained building permits for three SMRs to power a datacenter with over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity.

Meta in its recent earnings release raised its low-end guidance for 2024 capital expenditures by $1 billion – from $37 billion to $38 billion – while its top-end guidance remained at $40 billion. Much of that expense is intended for the build-out and provisioning of AI datacenters. ®