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Microsoft Sees Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Energy as Dynamic Duo.

Bloomberg, By Drake Bennett, September 29, 2023 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclear-free #NoNukes

“…………………………… Thinking, despite its benefits, is a lot of work, and it’s energy-intensive — human brains consume hundreds of calories a day. Artificial intelligence has much the same problem. While we can argue whether AI systems truly think and learn, they’re gobbling up enormous amounts of energy. All of those neural networks furiously training on an internet’s worth of data have a voracious appetite for electricity, as do the cooling systems needed to keep them from overheating.

The companies that have bet their future on AI know this, and they’re working on ways to solve the problem. One of the most interesting is Microsoft Corp. Its partnership with OpenAI has put it at the front of the tech world’s AI scrum. And staying there will require lots of energy, including — by Microsoft’s reckoning — nuclear power. Back in May, the company announced a power purchase agreement with Helion Energy, which has plans to start generating nuclear energy through fusion by 2028 (it already has built multiple working prototypes).

This week, Microsoft posted a job opening for a nuclear technology program manager, tasked with crafting a reactor strategy “to power the data centers that the Microsoft Cloud and AI reside on.”

There’s something a bit sobering about the idea of powering our newest potential threat to humanity with a technology associated with another one. ……………………………………………

The new Microsoft job involves overseeing small modular reactors, or SMRs,

October 1, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology