Huge investment! The "Gate of the Star" plan to promote AI development with solar energy and batteries

Stargate (Star Gate), worth $ 100 billion, plans to compete some electricity from solar energy and batteries. According to Bloomberg, the project's renewable energy facilities will be built by SoftBank's SB ENERGY company, but this is not the only source of the project.

Stargate is a cooperation between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group. It aims to establish a large number of new data centers to promote the rapid development of artificial intelligence applications.

In recent years, the vigorous development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has led developers and technology companies to scramble to occupy power resources. The US Department of Energy predicts that by 2028, the power consumption of the data center may account for 12%of all power production of the United States, and this number will be only 4.4%in 2023. Faced with the upcoming power shortage, it is expected that by 2027, 50% of the new data centers will face the dilemma of insufficient power.

In data center developers and technology companies, nuclear energy has become a popular choice. Google and Nuclear Energy startup KAIROS signed a 500 MW cooperation agreement, while Microsoft plans to restart a suspension reactor of Sanli Island. In addition, the data center operator Switch also reached a 12 -gigained cooperation agreement with the small modular reactor company OKLO last year.

However, the historical issues of nuclear energy projects have emerged endlessly, facing the trouble of cost overrun and the delay of the project. Although emerging nuclear energy startups are committed to overcome these issues through modular production and simplifying the approval process, as of now, no company has not yet completed the construction of reactors. It is expected that the first batch of commercial reactors will not be put into use until 2030. This eases recently. Energy shortage is almost no help.

In contrast, the construction speed of solar and wind energy is significantly faster. Studies have shown that the construction time of solar projects is usually shortened compared with nuclear energy and natural gas power plants. Because solar projects have certain modularity characteristics, they can start generating electricity when the entire project is not completed.

In solar projects, the most time -consuming link is often the permission and grid -connected stage. For data centers, the power grid connection is sometimes not necessary, and many data centers can directly obtain power from the power supply. In view of the urgency of the Stargate project, the relevant permit process may also be accelerated, so solar energy becomes the most likely source source for data centers.