To meet the growing demand for energy from advanced AI models, Oracle will build a data center powered by three small modular nuclear reactors.
Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison unveiled this ambitious plan during a recent earnings call transcribed by The Motley Fool.
The proposed nuclear data center would produce more than one gigawatt of energy. That would be enough to meet the significant processing needs of Oracle’s upcoming projects, including efforts to create a supercomputer more powerful than xAI’s new supercluster, Colossus.
Building permits for three nuclear reactors
“Today, Oracle has 162 cloud data centers, live and under construction around the world. The largest of these data centers is 800 megawatts and will contain acres of Nvidia GPU clusters capable of training the largest AI models in the world,” Ellison noted.
“That’s what it takes to stay competitive in the race to build one, just one, of the most powerful artificial neural networks in the world. Oracle is going to start building gigawatt-plus data centers soon. Building massive data centers with ultra-high bandwidth RDMA networks and massive 32,000-node Nvidia GPU clusters is something Oracle has proven to be very good at. It’s the reason we’re doing so well in the AI training business,” Ellison said.
Ellison went on to explain the rising cost of AI development, saying, “This race is endless, to build a better and better neural network. And the cost of that training is getting astronomical. When I talk about building gigawatt or multi-gigawatt data centers… the entry price for a real frontier model of someone who wants to compete in that space is about $100 billion. Let me repeat, about $100 billion.”
Ellison emphasized the complexity and scale of the projects Oracle has in development, saying, “We’re designing a data center that’s over a gigawatt in size. We’ve found the location, we’ve found the power source. We’ve looked at it, they already have building permits for three nuclear reactors. These are the small modular nuclear reactors to power the data center. This is how crazy it gets.” The Oracle chairman remained tight-lipped about the exact location and timeline for the project.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) have recently become increasingly popular as a viable energy source for large-scale data centers. Check notebook notes that there are currently only a few operational SMRs worldwide, notably in Japan, China and Russia. NuScale Energyan Oregon company, last year received certification for the first SMR in the US and it is likely that Oracle will use this advanced technology.