“Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power,” says a recent headline from the Washington Post. The source of this demand is a boom in AI and clean tech manufacturing. “Utilities can’t keep up!”

If this is true in the United States, an energy superpower, it must be equally true in Taiwan, an island nation that has to import 97.7% of its energy, mostly in the form of fossil fuels. Curiously, however, there is no hint that our government is aware of this pressing challenge. Instead, they and Taipower, the state utility that is the executor of their policies, prefer to constantly repeat that Taiwan is not running out of power. 

The other day Taipower held a seminar for large power users in Taichung, including cement and steel makers and manufacturers. They sought to educate them on “smart” power usage in order to cushion the impact of coming power price increases. “Smart” in this case is a euphemism for “use power when it is cheap, don’t use it when it is expensive.” Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but it is not going to work for AI Data Centers.

Those Data Centers not only demand a tremendous amount of power — Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell GPU will consumer one Kilowatt of power — that power has to be exceptionally clean. I don’t mean that in terms of being low-carbon. I mean the Data Centers demand extraordinarily stable and reliable electricity. In the industry, they call it “five nines” electricity: 99.999% uptime. This means that in a whole year, the power can only be interrupted for five minutes.

This need for exceptionally stable power is what drove Amazon Web Services to spend US$650 million to buy a new 960 megawatt data center that is 100% powered by nuclear energy near one of the US’s largest nuclear power stations.

The fact that it is low carbon energy is really just the icing on the cake. Indeed, in the US, the rise of data center driven energy usage have turned tech companies’ clean power problem into a power problem. Period. They have gone from seeking to lower their impact on climate change to scrambling frantically for more juice, and they don’t mind paying more for it either.

Under this new and un-anticipated demand, US utilities with old nuclear reactors in their portfolios are seeing a surge in their value: The stock price for Vistra and Constellation have gone up by over 50% since the start of 2024 alone. Each one of those legacy reactors, although they are typically forty years old, are considered a gem. Life extensions have become routine, meaning those plants could be generating power up to 60 and even 80 years.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, we are still planning to turn off our last nuclear reactors by next year. Sean Su, co-founder of the Taiwan Report fears missing out on AI growth could impact Taiwan’s future security and autonomy.

“We have to build our own AI using Traditional Chinese,” said Su, “we cannot rely on China to assist us.”

On the other hand, if Taiwan can come to embrace nuclear energy, Taiwan has the possibility to become a regional AI hub. Just look at a map, said Su. Taiwan’s central geographical location makes it idea for placement of AI data centers serving Asia. But they won’t come here if there isn’t stable, abundant power.

Fortunately, it’s not too late. All six of Taiwan’s complete nuclear reactors can be brought back online relatively easily and run for another forty years or so. In the meantime, data centers and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are a marriage made in heaven: The stability and safety of the SMRs guarantee data centers the reliable power they need, and the profitable data centers can afford to build the SMRs and pay an above-market rate for the power.

However, if we want to start building SMRs in the 2030s in Taiwan, the planning and permitting process have to start now. The legal framework needs to be updated to accommodate the co-location of SMRs with power-hungry chip fabs and data centers, and the people need to be educated on why a nuclear power plant is a great asset to their district, just like chip fabs and data centers. 

(This piece reflects the author's opinion, and does not represent the opinion of CommonWealth Magazine.)

About the author:

Angelica Oung is a Clean Energy advocate. Previously of the Taipei Times, ReNews and her own publication, Taiwan Offshore Wind Unredacted, she is the founder of the Clean Energy Transition Alliance (CETA). CETA's mission is to accelerate Taiwan's energy transition on the precondition of energy security and abundance. She can be contacted at [email protected]

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