Three Mile Island is proof AI and nuclear are a match made in heaven 😇

In today’s issue:

• AI is buying up all the nuclear
• $3 trillion of value talks about the future of AI
• A US and Australia deal is not going to fix the supply crunch

Editor’s note: Today, we bring you a guest piece by Sam Volkering from his publication AI Collision which was first published on Tuesday 24 September.

You can hear from Sam more often at AI Collision and learn more about the latest developments in AI by simply clicking here to sign up for free.

Plus if you want to hear about Sam’s latest research into where investors should look when investing in AI (and why wouldn’t you) then take a look here to find out what he’s uncovered about a company he calls “Britain’s Nvidia”.

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

“… the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history.”

That’s how the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission described the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979.

Three Mile Island was a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania that through a series of failures in its operating procedures and safety redundancies led to the nuclear core of its number 2 reactor being exposed and undergoing a partial meltdown leading to the release of radiation into the environment.

Thankfully, the radiation release was so little there has been no linking of the incident to any long-term public health problems. Although it did lead to heightened nuclear safety and engineering design, it also is still recognised as one of the world’s major nuclear failures and is regularly used as a reason why nuclear energy is too dangerous as an energy source.

The clean-up of Three Mile Island lasted from 1979 immediately after the incident through to 1993. The plant did reopen its number 1 reactor in 1985 but then retired the entire facility again in 2019.

A report in 2019 about its closure noted the decommissioning of the plant would take 60 years to complete.

Except…

Last week, only five years into its decommission timeline, Three Mile Island had a lifeline thrown to it… by Microsoft.

In an extraordinary deal, Constellation Energy (NASDAQ:CEG) – one of the world’s largest nuclear energy operators – announced it had entered a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft.

Constellation’s announcement said,

Constellation (Nasdaq: CEG) announced today the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of the Crane Clean Energy Center (CCEC) and restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons exactly five years ago today. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the renewed plant as part of its goal to help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy.

The announcement went into detail about the potential economic impact of restarting the plant including the 3,400 direct and indirect jobs it would create, the billions in GDP it would contribute to the economy and the fact it would generate huge amounts of carbon-free energy.

But the real story here isn’t so much that Three Mile Island is set to come back online. The massive news here is that it’s Microsoft buying up all the energy from it for at least 20 years and using it for its data centres.

Or to put it simply, Microsoft just bought a nuclear reactor to power its AI.

This of course set a fire under the backside of pretty much all nuclear-related stocks late last week. Constellation alone was up 22% on the news, other nuclear stocks like NuScale Power (up 11%), Centrus Energy (up 8.5%) and Oklo Inc. (up 27%) all flew higher.

The reason the whole nuclear market was on a tear was the wider market realising that if Microsoft was prepared to spend up for 20 years of nuclear energy for its data centres’ AI future, who else would be coming to market looking for nuclear solutions?

And social media was going nuts with commentary on this topic as well. Mainly because everyone with half an ounce of knowledge about AI has been saying for a long time (as we have) that the only solution to AI’s thirst for energy is nuclear energy.

And if you’re in two minds still about how well nuclear energy and AI go together, maybe consider what Yann LeCun the chief AI scientist at Meta had to say on the subject…

Yann LeCun on X.com

This is an ongoing story that will continue to unfold.

We will see more spending on both data centres and nuclear energy from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple and other giants of tech loaded up with cash.

This is both a tipping point for AI in terms of there is a solution to its insatiable appetite for energy, and for nuclear energy as the world starts to properly wake up to its absolute necessity for our AI future.

AI gone wild 🤪

Marc Benioff net worth: $9.4 billion. Claim to fame: founder and CEO of Salesforce (NASDAQ:CRM) with a market cap of $255 billion.

Jensen Huang net worth: $101.5 billion. Claim to fame: founder and CEO of Nvidia (NASADQ:NVDA) with a market cap of $2.84 trillion.

Combined, these guys have been the catalyst for over $3 trillion of value (countless more really when you look at how widespread their companies reach). So, when they both sit down together on stage and chat about the future of AI, it’s worth sitting up and paying attention…

… which you can do here.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week.)

Boom 📈

• Bigtincan Holdings (ASX:BTH) up 37%
• Symbotic Inc (NASDAQ:SYM) up 19%
• Appen Ltd (ASX:APX) up 17%

Bust 📉

• Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ:POAI) down 9%
• AeroVironment (NASDAQ:AVAV) down 5%
• Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) down 3%

From the hive mind 🧠

• Deals are getting done between Australia and the US on critical and strategic metals – basically everything needed to power a high-tech weapons and AI world. But even with new deals getting done, big mining still says it’s not enough to fix the impending supply crunch.
• At the UN’s Summit of the Future, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) got a lot of attention for a $120 million “Global AI Opportunity” fund. However the real story at the Summit of the Future was the entire UN freaking out over the threats AI poses to humanity. They want widespread regulation, a specific body (modelled after their climate change one) to keep the world up-to-date and with ultimate oversight on how AI rolls out – government led, not private capital led. Good luck with that!
• Everyone’s going full throttle at AI. Even Brazil wants a slice of the cake, and who can blame them? President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants AI as a platform for growth in Brazil. It’s very much a gold rush on AI and you can already see countries jockeying for the prime position to benefit.

Weirdest AI image of the day

Jean Hackman – r/weirddalle

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

“You should never start something unless you’re falling over with enthusiasm for it, otherwise the effort will outweigh the joy, and the roadblocks will seem insurmountable.” – Tim Westergren, 2007

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief, AI Collision

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And don’t forget to check out Sam’s latest presentation on Nvidia’s secret partner – an “unknown” British company that could present a massive investment opportunity. Find out more right here.

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