Japanese tech company Ubitus is looking to build a new data center close to a nuclear power plant, according to its CEO.
The firm, which provides cloud gaming infrastructure to some of the biggest names in the video games industry, including Nintendo and Sega, is looking for a location in Japan which will allow it to build a facility with up to 50MW of capacity.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ubitus CEO Wesley Kuo said the company was looking to buy land in Kyoto, Shimane, or on the southern island of Kyushu, with the availability of nuclear being a big factor in its decision.
Ubitus already runs two data centers for gaming clients in Tokyo and Osaka, and wants a third site to help it scale up its AI offerings, Kuo said.
“Unless we have other, better, efficient and cheap energy, nuclear is still the most competitive option in terms of cost and the scale of supply,” Kuo told Bloomberg. “For industrial use - especially AI - they need a constant, high-capacity supply.”
Kuo added that his company, which took funding from Nvidia earlier this year, would be looking for an initial 2-3MW of power for the new data center, with the potential to scale up to 50MW.
Access to nuclear power in Japan is heavily restricted following the Fukushima disaster in 2011, which saw a reactor malfunction at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, with radioactive material released into the environment.
But in other parts of the world, data center operators are increasingly turning to nuclear energy to meet their rapidly-growing power demands.
Earlier this year Amazon’s AWS acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, US, for $650 million. At the time, it was said to be able to support up to 960MW. In May, AWS was granted a 1,600-acre rezoning request to develop 15 data center buildings.
Meanwhile, in September Microsoft announced that it would take up 100 percent of a revived Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in an 837MW, 20-year deal. It has also signed PPA deals to procure the output of several other nuclear plants.
Oracle is also turning to nuclear, with founder Larry Ellison claiming his company plans to build a 1GW data center campus backed by three small modular reactors (SMRs). Further details of this project have yet to be revealed.
Earlier this week, Google announced a 500MW deal with SMR provider Kairos Power. The firm expects the first of the six to seven reactors under the agreement to come online in 2030.
