Oracle is going nuclear over growing demand for AI datacenters, and that's not a metaphor for Larry Ellison's mood.

On Monday's quarterly earnings call, Oracle's founder, chair and CTO revealed the database giant and cloud provider had secured building permits for a trio of small modular reactors (SMRs) to power a datacenter with over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity.

If you're not familiar, SMRs are miniaturized nuclear reactors not unlike those used in US naval vessels for nearly 70 years.

Unlike marine reactors, SMRs are designed to be mass produced. And unlike conventional reactor designs they won’t require massive physical infrastructure. In theory they’ll therefore be less expensive to operate, but still capable of producing tens or hundreds of megawatts of energy.

But no SMR is currently operating and pilot projects have not gone well.

Oracle's interest in SMRs as a power source comes as the cloud provider looks to expand its datacenter footprint.

"Oracle has 162 cloud datacenters, live and under construction throughout the world. The largest of these datacenters is 800 megawatts, and it will contain acres of Nvidia GPU clusters able to train the world's largest AI models," Ellison told analysts on the call. "Soon Oracle will begin construction of datacenters that are more than a gigawatt."

Execs did not say when the gigawatt-class datacenters and the SMRs powering them will come online.

However, we've previously looked at SMRs as a datacenter power source, and even the most optimistic estimates put the first deployments in the early 2030s.

We've asked Oracle for comment and will let you know if the mega-corp responds.

Despite their potential benefits, SMRs face considerable barriers to widespread deployment. Back in May, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that SMRs were "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."

However that hasn't stopped major hyperscalers from embracing nuclear reactors - whether SMRs or conventional designs. Earlier this year Amazon acquired Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter in a $650 million deal. Co-located alongside the 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant, the acquisition guarantees the cloud giant access to as much as 960 megawatts of capacity.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also sufficiently interested in SMRs that it hired someone to oversee their deployment. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/11/oracle_1gw_datacenter_smr_plan/