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Today on the podcast, I want to tell you about one of the biggest pieces of AI news that I think is happening this week. And there's actually a couple pieces but tying them together, that is Microsoft, their nuclear deal and their BlackRock deal. So both of these are massive when it comes to the future of AI and essentially Microsoft admitting that the only way AI is going to work is if we build more or unlock all the current nuclear electrical facilities in the United States and the world as a whole. So anyways, tons of crazy stuff going into this. I want to get into it. But today I wanted to say that if you haven't already, I have a school community called AI Hustle, where myself and my co host Jamie on the AI Hustle podcast, we break down every week a different side hustle that we have done that has made us money, that we use AI to do, whether that's from consulting to helping use AI for SEO for my different software companies. All sorts of different things that we have tried, including how I made $12,000 from a program on Amazon that anyone can do and it's not too crazy. So anyways, if you're interested in AI side Hustles, I would love for you to go join our school community. It's $19 a month right now, but eventually we're going to make that $100 a month. So the price is at a great price right now. We'll raise that eventually. If you're interested, join it. I'd love to have you on that in the school community talking about different things we're doing and how we make money from AI. So let's get into this story with Microsoft. The first thing to note is that Microsoft recently announced, and this was kind of before everyone knew exactly what was going on, a hundred billion dollars fund with BlackRock. And they said that it was an infrastructure fund that kind of focused on building out data centers. BlackRock recently acquired another fund that does some of this sort of infrastructure investment. And so it looks like this is exactly the direction they're going. And when it comes to like infrastructure and people are like, well, why is Microsoft starting a hundred billion dollar, you know, fund investing in infrastructure projects? Well, it's just for things like this, for their new nuclear deal. So they recently are tapping the nuclear reactors on the Three Mile island in Philadelphia, or sorry, in Pennsylvania. Now this is famous because this is right next to another site. So this isn't the actual site that had the meltdown, but there was a meltdown back in the 70s. I'm on Three Mile island on the reactors right next door. So these were not the same ones. These ones have been continuing to run. Um, but ever since that meltdown, obviously in the United States and from stuff we've seen with Japan during tsunamis and nuclear reactor meltdowns like this is something that people have sort of been scared about. We're realizing, I think more and more that if we want to switch to scaling up our energy capacities and people want to focus on cleaner energy, that nuclear is an amazing option. So it really, it hits a lot of different hits a lot of different things. And Microsoft has, has obviously noticed this. What's interesting with this deal is that they've essentially, the company that owns the plants is called Constellation Energy. Now this plant was shut down in 2019 and they cited that people weren't super interested in buying nuclear energy and some other issues. So they shut down the plant. But otherwise, I don't know if other than bad PR there was like much of a reason. It seems like nuclear is having a big resurgence right now. We have a lot of the top AI players, including Sam Altman, investing in nuclear fusion. Now the problem with nuclear fusion is that there's still a couple what you call physics breakthroughs that need to happen for nuclear fusion to actually work. And so in the meantime, everyone's like talking about nuclear fusion and a lot of people are like, well, wait a second, we already have nuclear. Why don't we just scale up? Nuclear, like this is not a brand new technology. We don't have to make any breakthroughs. It's already there. People are concerned about some of the safety concerns. If we can mitigate the safety concerns, why wouldn't we just scale that up? So China is already doing this, some are saying for their AI initiatives as well. But they are, they have approved and they're doing dozens of different brand new nuclear facilities that China is scaling up right now. And people are saying, look, us is going to get left behind. So obviously though, not everyone is letting this, is letting this, you know, slide. Microsoft has essentially contacted this shutdown nuclear plant on Three Mile island, stopped production in 2019. And they said, look, we will buy all of the energy that you can produce. We need this to power our AI and our data centers. We'll buy all the energy you can produce. So Constellation is going to spend $1.6 billion to essentially revive and get their plant back up to code. They got some regulatory approval that they need to do and they're hoping to get it running by 2028. So four years, it's not super fast, but if you're building a brand new nuclear plant from scratch, obviously that would take way longer. So it's kind of a low hanging fruit. It's like, look, it's a inactive nuclear reactor, but it didn't, it only shut down like five years ago. We get this thing back up and going for 1.6 billion and Microsoft is promised and signed the deal that they will buy all of the electricity that this thing can produce. So Microsoft just needs more energy. And it also begs the question like, and this thing isn't going to be online for four years, like Microsoft obviously is right now signing deals to get, you know, exclusive access to massive energy production platforms. I think they know that in the future as these AI models are scaling and growing, we're reaching the limit to what we can really like realistically grab from electricity that we can grab and energy that we can grab. Now the other problem and that I think that Microsoft is trying to solve is they said, I believe by 2030 that they were going to be completely clean energy for all their data centers. And in recent statements they've said that, you know, that was the goal. But they don't know if they're going to actually be able to hit that goal anymore because with AI and how much extra energy they need to use for AI and everything that they're doing, they're way behind on their goal and they, they just have to get the energy in order to train these models. And so they're just kind of letting the whole green energy thing go to the wayside. So it seems that this whole nuclear concept is their solution for their initiatives that they're doing there, which I'm assuming probably ties into like stock incentives and getting included in different things. So they probably want it for like financial reasons as well as, you know, if you think Microsoft just wants to make the world a better place, that's fantastic and maybe they do and that's a really optimistic view. Also I think there's a lot of financial incentives for them to do this as well. So either way that's the goal that they're fixing and this is essentially the solution that they have come up to with this. Now what's interesting is Microsoft's deal, they promise that they're going to buy all of the power that this thing can produce over the next 20 years. And Constellation has promised that or has said essentially that once they restore this thing and spend 1.6 billion to restore it, this reactor is going to have a capacity of 835 megawatts. So this is, this is massive. This is tons of electricity. And the cool thing that I think is really kind of the jobs front, how this nuclear reactor is going to help. Now this is another interesting concept, right? So when we talk about AI a lot of times, you know, I recently did a whole podcast about Salesforce and their new agents. I did this over on the AI Applied podcast and Connor and I talked about the fact that these AI agents essentially are going to replace a lot of salespeople. And Salesforce knows this, so they're charging $2 a conversation that you use their agents for instead of seats because they know that a lot of companies are going to lay off a lot of their Salesforce and essentially Salesforce's software is going to become the Salesforce. So potentially a lot of job loss there. Now we talk about the job loss, but what we don't talk a lot about is the job gains from AI. Now I am a huge proponent that when something this revolutionary comes through, it overall raises the global standard of living, enables tons of new jobs, tons of new things and a lot of high paying jobs. So sure, there's going to be a lot of people that are great with AI and I think big companies are probably going to let go of people, but that those people will then go start their own companies or work for smaller companies. And so the talent pool just going to get a little bit more spread out in that regard. But in addition to that, as far as jobs that are directly going to be fueled by AI for this nuclear reactor alone, and this is one that Microsoft's trying to put back online, you know, China's doing dozens. So I would assume over the next few years, depending on how the politics in the United States goes, we could be, assuming we have a nuclear friendly administration next on track to, you know, approve dozens, if not 100 nuclear reactors in the United States. Personally, I mean, I don't think it's a political issue. I think that we need the energy and I think nuclear is good. That's my opinion. And everyone's got their own opinion, whatever. So what, what is the actual like benefit? Is this going to produce jobs or is AI losing jobs? Well, listen to this. So according to their projections, the plant is expected to create about 3,400 direct and indirect jobs. Now you, you can measure the direct and indirect jobs because obviously there's the direct jobs, the literal people working at the plant, but then there's all the indirect jobs. That means all the plant workers, they have to pay someone for housing. They Got to go to the grocery store. Now they got to the supply chain that supplies goods to the nuclear plant. So essentially from like net, all of the new jobs that are created from this facility actually being running is going to be about 3,400 and it's going to be about $16 billion that's going to be added to Pennsylvania's GDP. So this is great. And they've even said that about $3 billion is going to be paid to state and federal taxes. So the state and federal taxes are going to be making money. Pennsylvania's GDP is going to be growing. Tons of new jobs are going to be created. I think this is going to be really interesting. So the CEO of Constellation, Joe Dominguez, he said in a statement, quote, powering industries critical to our nation's global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon free and reliable every hour of the day. And nuclear plants are the only energy source that consistently deliver on that promise. Now he kind of, it's kind of funny, nuclear is kind of like this interesting energy source because it is true that like solar, wind, these are awesome. But like if there's no wind, the windmills don't turn. If it's cloudy, the solar panels aren't grabbing a lot of, you know, solar and converting it to energy. So like the clean energy is great, but it's not 100% reliable. And like you can't always even predict the weather. So you, you know, you don't even know when these things are going to be on or offline. So that's kind of the tricky thing. So sure there's batteries and other things we can do, but if you need consistent high powered energy all the time, right now we just turn to burning coal or burning gas and you can just run a generator and produce your energy. Right. So nuclear is an amazing option because it has that same capability without creating any sort of emissions. And so that's something that people really do love about this. I think this is absolutely fascinating. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, he has, he's called for an energy breakthrough and I think he's really focuses on nuclear energy. Back in March, Amazon bought a nuclear powered data center in Pennsylvania. They paid about $650 million for it. So this is obviously something that there's a lot of competition for. And so yeah, I think this is going to be amazing. Back in June, Bloomberg said that big Tech's upcoming data centers promised to use about combined about 508 terawatt hours electricity per year. If they run constantly. So that would be more than the total electrical electricity produced in Australia in a year. So obviously there is a huge demand for electricity. These data centers that everyone's building out right now in anticipation for everything happening in AI, this is, this is quite massive. And so I think this is definitely very, very important. There's been, I think, a bunch of nuclear fusion startups which have raised about $7.1 billion to date. And so that's kind of what people are looking at. But again, I mentioned with nuclear fusion, there's some, there's some issues that have not completely been solved. So in the meantime, nuclear seems like an awesome option. I'm excited to see where this goes, how Microsoft is able to harness this electricity, and if this becomes a broader trend where we actually start building more nuclear options in the United States. I think this is incredibly important if we want to stay competitive. And we got to get this energy from somewhere. So either we're pumping it out of Saudi Arabia and Russia or, you know, other places that, some of which, you know, it might not be in the national interest of America to continue funding. This is a great option where we can build it or we can create energy at home and produce it at scale and it's, it's, you know, less emission. So this is an awesome option. I'm super excited to see where this goes. I'll keep you updated on all of it. And as I mentioned, if you're interested in joining a community that teaches you how to make money from AI, how to create different side hustles, how to create different businesses, and how to use AI to grow your current business, you have, you got to join our AI Hustle School community. The link is in the description. It is at a discount this week, but we'll be raising the price. Anyways, thanks so much for tuning to the podcast and I hope that you have an amazing rest of your day.
