Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish.
The Register offers that analysis after Électricité de France (EDF) on Monday advised that four of the production units at its Gravelines nuclear plant shut down due to “massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish in the filter drums of the pumping stations” at the facility.
Each production unit at the plant can produce 900 MW of power, enough to power several significant datacenters.
EDF said the pumping station is in the “non-nuclear” part of the facility, and the jellyfish therefore had no impact on safety at the plant, and did not increase risk for the staff who work there or the nearby environment.
The closure of the production units also seems not to have endangered nearby datacenters: The Register can find no reports of outages or brownouts, even in the datacenter-dense region near the city of Lille which is around 80 kilometers from Gravelines and houses Euro-cloud OVH’s Roubaix region.
Interest in nuclear energy has grown in recent years as datacenter operators look for new power sources to energise the giant facilities needed to run AI workloads at scale. We’ve reported on companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta investing in nuclear energy to power their datacenters.
Some of those plans involve locating datacenters next to nuclear power plants, as doing so reduces the chance that problems elsewhere on the grid will impact operation of AI hardware.
Perhaps Big Tech’s datacenter planners will consider this incident in France and rethink some aspect of their designs to reduce the risk that jellyfish, or other local wildlife, could take an AI offline. Or perhaps The Register just reported news of the future. Again. ®