Did Rare Bees Actually Kill Meta’s Nuclear-Powered AI Data Center Plans
Meta was on track to become the first company using nuclear power for AI through the largest nuclear plant currently available for data center use.
Biologists discovered endangered pollinators while reviewing land meant for a new AI data center. They claim it to be from an endangered bee, but accounts do not list a species. Meta states that this, in part, halted the development but note other regulatory hurdles. In short endangered species regulations probably did not stop the development, but made it more costly by requiring habitat protections, that Meta decided they did not want to complete.
Below are the nuclear plants in the United States. Let’s take a closer look to see if we can find out more.
Where the Bumblebees Roam
The federal agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has designated a number of bees as endangered and a total of 99 species of insects.
Rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) was listed as endangered in 2017, this species has seen its range decline since 2007. Factors that have contributed to its decline include disease, pesticides, and climate change. Historically, the rusty patched bumble bee was broadly distributed across the eastern United States, Upper Midwest, and southern Quebec and Ontario in Canada. Since 2000, this bumble bee has been reported from only 13 states and 1 Canadian province: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada.
A quick overlay of power plants and the species occurrence likely places the proposed center in the Great Lakes, but it could be anywhere the historic range of the species occurs.
Map of rusty patch bumble bee range and survey data. (USFWS)
Franklin's bumble bee (Bombus franklini) listed as endangered, this species has seen a decline in resiliency, redundancy, and representation since the late 1990s. It has the most limited distribution of any known North American bumble bee species. It occurs in northern California and southern Oregon. There are no nearby power plants.
Franklin’s Bumble Bee
USFWS has also designated two species, Assimulans yellow-faced bee, Easy yellow-faced bee, Hawaiian yellow-faced bee, and Hilaris yellow-faced bee as endangered. However, these species occur mostly in Hawaii.
The State of California has also listed some of the bumblebees as candidate endangered species, such as the Crotch's bumble bee, Franklin's bumble bee, western bumble bee, and the Suckley's cuckoo bumble bee. When looked at collectively, these species ranges cover most of the state. This means that California environmental regulations could also be involved, through CEQA and CESA.
However, most endangered species regulations do not prohibit development, but require permits and compensatory mitigation. This means that the developer, Meta, would merely have to protect and restore habitat in other areas for the impacted species. So, it’s not likely a bee shut down this development, but that Meta decided the costs were too high.
AI Energy Vampires
A recent Goldman Sachs report that predicted data center power demands will grow by 160 percent by the end of the decade.
Meta and many other tech companies continue to face energy crunches thanks to their recent AI investments.
Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed its greenhouse gas emissions rose an estimated 29 percent since 2020 due to new data centers specifically “designed and optimized to support AI workloads.” Google has also calculated its own pollution generation has increased as much as 48 percent since 2019, largely because of data center energy needs.
A Focus on Nuclear Power
A single AI-integrated search query, for example, is estimated to require up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search—equivalent to keeping one light bulb on for 20 minutes. In response, tech companies have announced multiple plans in recent months that hinge on nuclear power. Microsoft currently aims to bring the infamous Three Mile Island plant back online for its AI needs, while Amazon is funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into a partnership with Pennsylvania’s nuclear plant in Susquehanna.
Meta’s director of engineering for Generative AI, Sergey Edunov, stated two power plants would seem to be enough to power humanity’s AI needs for a year.
Google has signed a “world first” deal to buy energy from a fleet of mini nuclear reactors to generate the power needed for the rise in use of artificial intelligence. The US tech corporation has ordered six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) from California’s Kairos Power, with the first due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.
Amazon Web Services bought Talen Energy’s 960-megawatt data center campus in Pennsylvania powered by the adjacent nuclear plant, Susquehanna Steam Electric Station.
Saving Bees and Storing Data
With proper mitigation it may be possible to enhance bee populations at data centers and set aside properties that will be protected in perpetuity.
When Meta in 2016 began building a data center in County Meath, Ireland, Meta became a supporter of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan from the country’s National Biodiversity Data Centre. The plan acts as a framework urging communities, businesses and authorities to help restore Ireland’s pollinator levels, which are largely dependent on wild bees that face extinction across one-third of its species.
After discovering that it could “potentially contribute to the plan and help reverse the decline of bees in the community,” Meta began adding plants, shrubs and trees to its County Meath data center location to feed the bees and implemented a beekeeping program on-site to oversee ten hives and some half a million bees.
