Like its Big Tech rivals, Meta (META) has been on a voracious spending spree lately to build data centers to power its A.I. ambition. But the Mark Zuckerberg-helmed company recently ran into an unusual problem: bees.
Meta had reportedly been planning on establishing a new nuclear-powered data center in the U.S., but the company’s deal came to an end amid environmental and regulatory issues that included the discovery of a rare bee species on the project’s land, according to the Financial Times, which noted that Zuckerberg reportedly told staffers at an all-hands meeting last week that the bees would have complicated the proposed center. Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
This isn’t the first time endangered bees have played a role in Meta’s data center efforts. When the company 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.
“The biggest way that we can influence biodiversity is by the people who own land,” Michelle Wallace, the director of operations at Host in Ireland, an initiative representing the digital infrastructure and data center community, told Observer. Host in Ireland drew from the National Biodiversity Data Centre’s expertise four years ago to launch an industry-wide “DCs for Bees” pollinator plan urging the data center sector to become more pollinator-friendly.
Besides its efforts in Ireland, Meta has additionally installed beehives across offices in Seattle and New York and established more than 30 acres of pollinator habitat at a data center site in Gallatin, Tenn. The company is expected to ramp up its spending and construct more data centers to meet its lofty A.I. goals, with capital expenditures for 2024 to reach $38 billion to $40 billion.
Meta’s halted data center project would have been powered by nuclear power
Like its competitors, Meta is also reportedly considering nuclear energy partners as it seeks out carbon-free ways to support its power-intensive A.I. data centers. ChatGPT queries consume nearly ten times as much energy as Google (GOOGL) searches, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report that predicted data center power demands will grow by 160 percent by the end of the decade.
To offset a rise in emissions, Amazon (AMZN) and Google last month unveiled deals with small modular reactor (SMR) developers, which provide next-generation nuclear plant designs. In August, Microsoft (MSFT) announced plans to purchase power from nuclear plant Three Mile Island in Middletown, Penn., which is expected to reopen one of its units in 2028.
Meta’s recently thwarted data center project in the U.S. would have been powered by an existing nuclear power plant operator, as reported the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the plan. According to the outlet, Zuckerberg told Meta employees that the now-scuppered deal would have made Meta the first Big Tech company to provide nuclear-powered A.I.
While the bee species discovery may have halted Meta’s timeline, the project’s interruption is a positive indicator that biodiversity needs are being considered by the data center sector, said Wallace. Meta’s pausing of its project is “amazing,” she said. “Let there be more of that. It’s about being really sensitive to the environment that you’re putting in—no matter the building, no matter the use.”
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