Japanese technology company Ubitus is looking to build a new data center near a nuclear power plant, according to its CEO.
The company, which provides cloud gaming infrastructure to some of the biggest names in the video game industry, including Nintendo and Sega, is looking for a location in Japan that will allow it to build a facility with a capacity of up to 50MW. In an interview with Bloomberg, Ubitus CEO Wesley Kuo said the company is looking to buy land in Kyoto, Shimane, or the southern island of Kyushu, and that the availability of nuclear power will be a factor in its decision.
Ubitus already has two data centers for gaming customers in Tokyo and Osaka and wants a third site to help it expand its AI offerings, Kuo said. “Unless we have other energy that is better, efficient and cheap, nuclear is still the most competitive option in terms of cost and scale of supply,” Kuo told Bloomberg. “For industrial use, especially AI, they need a steady supply and high capacity.”
Kuo added that his company, which received funding from Nvidia earlier this year, is looking at an initial capacity of 2 to 3 MW for the new data center, with the potential to expand to 50 MW. Access to nuclear power in Japan has been severely limited since the Fukushima disaster in 2011, when the reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant malfunctioned, releasing radioactive material into the environment.
But in other parts of the world, data center operators are increasingly turning to nuclear power to meet growing energy demands. Earlier this year, Amazon’s AWS acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, US, for $650 million. At the time, it was said to be capable of supporting up to 960 MW. In May, AWS received a rezoning request for 1,600 acres to build 15 data center buildings.
Meanwhile, in September, Microsoft announced it would acquire 100% of the revamped Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in a 20-year, 837-MW deal. It has also signed power purchase agreements to buy the output of several other nuclear plants.
Oracle is also turning its attention to nuclear power, with founder Larry Ellison saying his company plans to build a 1 GW data center campus supported by three small modular reactors (SMRs). Further details of this project have not yet been revealed.
Earlier this week, Google announced a 500 MW deal with SMR supplier Kairos Power. The company expects the first of the six or seven reactors covered in the deal to come online in 2030.
