Mark Zuckerberg has always been accused of moving fast and breaking things. However, his company, Meta, is now moving quickly to power things, specifically, artificial intelligence on a planetary scale.
Meta’s 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to rescue an Illinois nuclear power plant from closure is more than a corporate power contract. It’s a declaration: the future of Meta’s AI empire will run not just on lines of code, but on uranium rods and cooling towers. The agreement preserves 1,100 jobs and secures power for 800,000 homes, but behind the PR gloss lies a chilling reality. AI consumes energy like a starving black hole, and nuclear power may be the only force that can feed it.
The Nuclear Lifeline
The U.S. Department of Energy has warned that data centers could consume up to 12% of America’s electricity by 2028, a threefold increase in just a decade. Generative AI, from chatbots to image synthesis, is driving much of that surge. Training large models like Meta’s LLaMA requires fleets of GPUs performing trillions of operations per second, burning colossal amounts of power, while inference keeps the demand constant. Cooling those racks often means pumping in water by the millions of gallons or consuming yet more electricity to keep servers below meltdown temperatures.
Meta’s pivot to nuclear energy is partly an act of desperation. While France proudly proclaims “plug, baby, plug” thanks to its 75% nuclear grid, the U.S. still leans heavily on natural gas and coal for data centers. The green dream of solar and wind, which accounts for only about 24% of U.S. data center energy today, cannot scale fast enough. Zuckerberg’s nuclear gamble looks visionary in this light: it bypasses fossil fuels and offers carbon-free, round-the-clock reliability. However, it also ties the future of AI to an industry plagued by the legacies of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and political backlash.
Cooling the Planet or Playing God?
And as if nuclear isn’t enough, Silicon Valley’s brightest are eyeing geoengineering, dimming the sun to counteract the very warming their technologies accelerate. Venture capitalists are funding projects to inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, launching balloons to “sell cooling credits,” and openly quoting science fiction novels like Termination Shock as playbooks.
It’s a bleak irony: one branch of tech digs deeper into the Earth to cool reactors, while another wants to block sunlight from the sky. Meanwhile, oceans risk boiling around data centers, rivers are drained for cooling, and humanity teeters on a razor’s edge between salvation and hubris.
The Zuckerberg Dilemma
Mark Zuckerberg now stands as an unlikely nuclear baron. His choice is framed as pragmatic, to keep the lights on for Meta’s AI ambitions, to keep American jobs alive, and to stay ahead of rivals like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which are all racing to secure their own energy pipelines. But the stakes are planetary.
If nuclear-powered AI succeeds, Zuckerberg may be remembered as the man who bridged the energy gap and enabled a new technological renaissance. If it fails, if nuclear mishaps, climate side effects, or geoengineering miscalculations spiral out of control, he may be remembered as the man who lit the match while the world’s oceans boiled to keep his machines cool.
Because this isn’t just about AI models anymore, it’s about whether humanity can innovate its way out of the climate-energy-AI trap, or whether the same ingenuity that built the digital age will be what ends it.
