Get the latest tech news
Meta buys a nuclear power plant (more or less)
Meta announced Tuesday morning that it was paying billions of dollars to keep an Illinois nuclear power plant running through 2047.
Electricity will still flow to the local grid, so Meta’s purchase won’t directly power one of its data centers, though the company does have one about two hours north of Clinton in DeKalb. Before the recent boom in data center construction, nuclear reactors had faced a grim future as cheap wind, solar, and natural gas undercut their power-generating costs. The power provider initially planned to shut down the Clinton reactor in June 2017 as it faced stiff competition from cheap natural gas, but Illinois legislators stepped in with subsidies that encouraged Constellation to keep the lights on.
Or read this on TechCrunch
