The Verge
Small modular reactors are factory-made nuclear plants designed to be built in repeatable units instead of one huge bespoke station. Amazon, X-energy and American Electric Power plan 12 Xe-100 reactors at a former coal site in Indiana, together rated at 960 megawatts for the grid and Amazon's data centers. The reactor design is still being licensed.
Summary written with AI by HowTechMoves, based on reporting by The Verge.
MIT Technology Review
Moore's Law, the long trend of packing more transistors onto chips, has slowed, and other scaling laws for power, storage and fiber are flattening too. Big gains now come from building larger data centers, with six major cloud companies on track to spend over $700 billion this year. These are engineering trends rather than physical limits, and physics still leaves room for denser computing.
The Baltimore Sun
The US Department of Energy is lending up to $4.4 billion to restart three closed nuclear plants, partly to supply data centers. Restarting an existing reactor is faster and cheaper than building a new one, though owners must retrain workers, check equipment and restore licenses. The three plants would add 2.25 gigawatts, about enough for 2 million homes and businesses.
The Boston Globe
A developer wants to sink a data center to the seafloor off eastern Maine, powering it with the region's strong tides and using seawater to absorb the heat that servers produce. The early vision includes an 80-foot concrete frame, pressurized cylinders, up to 50 tidal turbines and a 1.5-mile cable to shore. Eastport has imposed a 180-day moratorium while residents raise concerns about the bay and its marine life.
CNBC
Modern AI models are trained on GPUs, the processors that crunch neural networks, and renting them beats buying. CNBC lists the options, from big clouds like Amazon, Microsoft and Google to newer GPU specialists called neoclouds, online marketplaces and direct purchases; an industry researcher counted 323 companies offering Nvidia GPU capacity in September, up from 209 under a year earlier.