Three Mile Island is the home of a nuclear power plant that had a meltdown in 1979. Since the Three Mile Island meltdown and various other nuclear meltdowns, nuclear energy has been widely speculated as unsafe and harmful. Nuclear meltdowns can cause radioactive material to spill out of the power plant, and contaminate large portions of land, making it completely uninhabitable for decades. However, nuclear energy is a 100% clean energy source, meaning it produces no carbon dioxide.

Because nuclear energy is carbon-emission-free, it has recently become the go-to energy source for Microsoft, which looks for carbon-free energy sources to fill the immense amounts of energy it needs to power its data centers and AI models. These data centers can store several exabytes and can require 2,400 MWhs of energy daily. For reference, on average, a US household uses around 10MWh of energy per year! This means that these data centers use 240x the amount of energy an average US household uses in a year per day. That energy is used simply for data centers and does not even account for query requests and the energy used by the AI’s GPU, which is a chip that processes large quantities of data. Microsoft AI has GPUs that are running constantly and processing thousands of user requests (queries) every second. On average, a single query uses .001 – .01 mWh of energy. If Microsoft Copilot is getting thousands of requests per second, Copilot AI could easily reach 500 MWh of energy used per day.

Because Microsoft has recently made such large advances with their Copilot AI, they have to find ways to cope with the immense amounts of energy being used by this AI. To achieve Microsoft’s goal of becoming a carbon-negative company, they have to use carbon-free energy sources to power all of their virtual infrastructure. Microsoft’s recent decision to resurrect Three Mile Island is the perfect example of how they plan to achieve this goal. Microsoft’s problem with the power consumption of AI is nothing out of the ordinary and is a very common problem that is associated with AI. A way to reduce AI’s insane power consumption would allow for leaps in future technology and AI abundance. However, while the problem still presents itself, Microsoft is doing its best to combat it through the use of carbon-free energy sources, like Three Mile Island.