France taps nuclear power for new AI training cluster

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. France is making a bid to catch up in the artificial intelligence race by leaning on one of its strengths: plentiful nuclear power. The French government plans Monday to pledge a gigawatt of nuclear power for a new artificial-intelligence computing project expected to cost tens of billions of dollars, according to its private-sector backers and the French government.

Combined with another newly announced French AI project funded by Middle Eastern investors that also aims for gigawatt scale, the plans would greatly expand Europe’s AI-computing capabilities to rival a vast expansion in the U.S. The nuclear project, which aims to have a first tranche of 250 megawatts of power hooked up to AI-computing chips by the end of 2026, rivals the Stargate project in the U.S., backed by SoftBank and OpenAI. Stargate is starting with a campus in Texas initially fed by 200 megawatts of power, with plans to expand to 1.2 gigawatts.

FluidStack, the company spearheading the nuclear-powered AI cluster in France, said it aims to begin construction in the third quarter. Still, there is no guarantee its project will move forward as envisioned, or if it will secure enough money—or AI chips—to build it. AI computing requires vast amounts of power as big tech companies shell out billions of dollars to build massive clusters of electricity-hungry chips.

Those chips, mostly made by Nvidia, are the workhorses of the AI boom, performing the computations that underlie AI models. Some of today’s most advanced AI models were trained at data centers with about 30 megawatts of electricity, the research group Epoch AI estimates. But by 2030, leading AI models may need more than 5 gigawatts of electricity—a