AI’s real bottleneck is electricity. Who will pay for it?

Within a week, two of the three largest cloud computing firms in the world signed 20-year contracts for nuclear electricity.

What happened

In practice, a few years ago, such agreements would have seemed inconceivable. Nuclear power had fallen out of favour after accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chornobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. While Japan shut down its reactors after Fukushima, although it has since begun restarting them, germany phased out nuclear power. In plenty of democratic countries, advocating for nuclear energy became politically challenging.

The bottom line

For now, aI's real bottleneck is electricity. Who will pay for it? Remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.