The Diablo Canyon power plant will soon use artificial intelligence to manage its archives and schedule maintenance, marking the first commercial deployment of generative AI at a nuclear facility.
The move is the latest example of the growing intersection between technology firms and the energy sector. Also on Wednesday, small modular nuclear startup Oklo announced it would supply up to 750 megawatts of power to data centers, which are proliferating as demand for AI skyrockets.
Taken together, the two projects demonstrate the paradox of AI’s relationship with energy. On the one hand, AI data centers have a power-heavy diet, and their proliferation is straining the grid — prompting energy companies like Oklo to offer dedicated power. On the other hand, AI software can help manage electrical resources and improve efficiency — as is the case at Diablo Canyon.
Software firm Atomic Canyon — in partnership with utility Pacific Gas and Electric — will launch AI firm Nvidia’s technology at Diablo Canyon to help the plant manage its antiquated archive. The AI will take documents that the plant already has and put them into a database. That database will use a natural language model to make documents more easily searchable.
