Constellation CEO Says US Should Copy China to Meet AI Power Use

(Bloomberg) -- To meet the surging demand for electricity to run artificial intelligence, the US should emulate China, according to the head of the power company that just inked a deal with Microsoft Corp. to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Big technology companies are proposing data centers so massive that they could only function if they’re built alongside power plants, Joe Dominguez, Chief Executive Officer of Constellation Energy Corp., said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg News. China is already taking that approach in the AI projects it’s planning, Dominguez said.

That’s a significant shift from the current models that rely on miles and miles of long-distance transmission lines to carry electricity. But there’s a shortage of wires in the US and utilities say it can take years to connect facilities to the grid. The delays are a hurdle for data center operators that need power as soon as possible — and AI’s importance to national security is compounding the urgency, Dominguez said. 

“Constellation has been part of discussions with customers that are looking at multi-gigawatt data centers,” Dominguez said in an interview Monday at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York. “It could only be done at the location the power is produced.” 

Across the US, energy companies are racing to meet a jump in electricity demand from power-hungry AI data centers, manufacturing facilities and electric vehicles. As recently as a few years ago, experts thought that solar and wind output would be sufficient to meet additional power needs. Now coal plants are being kept online longer, utilities are planning record amounts of new natural gas generation and nuclear reactors are popular again.

Constellation announced last week that it would restart a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania and deliver the power to Microsoft. And Amazon.com Inc. agreed in March to spend $650 million to acquire a data center campus connected to another nuclear plant in the state. Given the enormous power needs, nuclear plants that run around the clock are the best options for delivering energy to outsized US data centers, Dominguez said.

“AI is here to stay,” he said Monday during an interview on Bloomberg Television. “And the country has to be successful on AI from a geopolitical security perspective as well as an economic perspective.” 

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