By Rachel Morison
The U.S. government agreed a US$80 billion deal with Westinghouse Electric Co. to build nuclear reactors, the latest push to meet rising demand for electricity from artificial intelligence.
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The strategic partnership — which also involves Brookfield Asset Management and Canadian uranium producer Cameco Corp. — aims to deliver on United States President Donald Trump’s AI ambitions and scale up an industry he sees as vital to competing with China. It will create tens of thousands of jobs, the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.
In the U.S., power consumption from data centres is set to double by 2035, to almost nine per cent of all demand, according to BloombergNEF. It’s causing a rush to build new power stations and secure grid connections. But building new reactors takes several years and some companies, like Google, are looking at reopening shuttered nuclear plants to try to get power quicker.
Each two-unit Westinghouse AP1000 project creates or sustains 45,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in 43 states, and a national deployment will create more than 100,000 construction jobs, the companies said.
“The program will cement the United States as one of the world’s nuclear energy powerhouses and increase exports of Westinghouse’s nuclear power generation technology globally,” according to the statement.
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