Nuclear Power and Artificial Intelligence – What tech companies and the nuclear industry are planning

Dear friends!

Largely unnoticed by the public, a new unholy alliance is currently forming: powerful tech companies like Microsoft and influential Silicon Valley investors around Trump financier Peter Thiel are teaming up with the nuclear industry. Their goal: to convince governments that the energy hunger of artificial intelligence can only be satisfied with nuclear power. It is true that the energy requirements of large AI language models such as ChatGPT are skyrocketing, and that they are hardly being considered in the plans for the energy transition.

However, it is a myth that nuclear power is the only solution. 

Renewables are already cheaper, can be built faster and function decentrally without mega-corporations. In addition, the nuclear industry and tech moguls are ignoring the many unresolved problems of nuclear power and passing them on to society. From final storage and safety to the origin of the uranium from countries like Russia. In the US, Microsoft has already bought the decommissioned ‘Three Mile Island 1’ reactor and plans to put it back into operation. In Europe, too, there is growing pressure to plan future data centres directly with nuclear reactors instead of using affordable renewables. 

They are primarily concerned with one thing: control.

Because if private actors make their own energy policy for their own profit, if they can set strategy and prices as they please and can no longer be shut down in an emergency, then citizens and democracy are left behind. 

An example of where this can lead: a few conversations between Elon Musk and the Kremlin were enough for him to temporarily shut down his Starlink internet for Ukrainian defenders.

In this webinar, we want to take a closer look at what Microsoft, Thiel and Co. are currently planning. And develop a counter-model of how digital transformation and artificial intelligence goes together with ecological transformation, in which citizens have the say, and not the libertarian-chauvinist tech boys Musk, Thiel and Co.

Our guests are:

• Dr Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at The AI Now Institute
• Anke Herold, Executive director of the Öko-Institut e.V.
• Jutta Paulus MEP, energy expert of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament (co-organiser)
• Alexandra Geese MEP, digital expert of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament (co-organiser)

Sign up here!

Your Jutta Paulus