Names poached from Tolkien’s works. Glossy websites, packed with animations and all kinds of promises. Slightly ludicrous tech demonstration. All the hallmarks of today’s tech companies, one might think. But in the case of one nuclear power start-up, the super-slick marketing is actually a good reminder that AI’s rampant hunger for energy needs can’t be ignored or solved by traditional methods.
As reported by our chums over at Tom’s Hardware, Valar Atomics recently hit the headlines by teaming up with Nvidia to demonstrate the first public run of its Ward 250 nuclear reactor, namely by using said device to power a DGX Spark. Not that one needs a big powerplant to run Nvidia’s GB20-powered box, of course, but it’s not hard to see what the implication is behind the tech demonstration.
Yes, that’s right: it’s a solution to the exponential rise in energy consumption by AI data centers, hence Nvidia’s involvement in all of this. But let me back up for a moment and explain what’s noteworthy about Valar’s system.
The Ward 250 is a type of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear microreactor (HTGR for short), which uses helium as the coolant and heat-transfer medium, rather than water, the norm for most reactors worldwide. But rather than using bulky heat exchangers to turn water into steam to drive a bunch of turbines and generators, Valar’s system pushes the helium through a compact thermoelectric generator.