Nvidia-backed Ubitus K.K looks to build data center powered by nuclear energy

Tokyo-based Ubitus K.K, a cloud services company backed by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is looking to acquire land to build a data center in Kyoto, Shimane, or a prefecture in Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, owing to the availability of nuclear power in the region, Bloomberg reported.

Ubitus K.K, which already has two data centers for gaming, plans to build a third to serve generative artificial intelligence, CEO Wesley Kuo told Bloomberg in an interview.

Recently, there has been a flurry of nuclear deals between utilities and technology behemoths, looking to power their artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions while maintaining their respective clean energy goals.

The typical power usage by AI models is quite a lot; this is because of the vast amount of data that these models have to compute to generate responses. In that context, nuclear energy appears favorable over wind or solar, as nuclear creates a larger amount of power that is stable and consistently available on demand.

Recently, Amazon (AMZN) announced $500M of investments in atomic energy, which included signing a deal with Dominion Energy (D) to explore building a small modular nuclear reactor near the North Anna station.

Before this, Google (GOOGL) announced an agreement to purchase power generated from multiple small modular reactors to be built by nuclear energy startup Kairos Power. Not only this, Microsoft (MSFT) has also teamed up with Constellation Energy (CEG) to resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island nuke plant in Pennsylvania.