Globally, datacenter infrastructure is expected to more than double over the same period, going from two to four percent of all electrical demand and adding the equivalent of a brand new medium-sized European nation.
These may seem poor reasons to lumber the environment when we’re supposed to be lightening the load, but it also highlights one of long-term facts of life for the big IT shed builders.
We can’t rip out all the roads and railways and rebuild them to match the needs of the 21st century: we’re having enough trouble with replacing internal combustion with electric motors.
Seventy years on, this technology is being looked at as a civil power source, but is struggling to free itself from the stagnating legacy of earlier, far more massive nuclear programmes.
So imagine if the world’s datacenter industry got together – yes, a fantasy, but these are needful items - and issued a specification for a standard, modular, small nuclear power plant.
It’s the kind of low-risk, low-cost, environmentally positive move that governments can get behind without massive commitment of public funds, and made part of a (whisper it) industrial strategy that includes easing fiber provisioning and simple licensing.
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