The government is talking about building data centers in Slovakia. According to Prime Minister Robert Fico, Slovakia is becoming a suitable location for artificial intelligence-related facilities, primarily because of its water reserves for cooling and plans to build a new nuclear power unit. "Just imagine—interest in Slovakia is growing when it comes to data centers, which require massive amounts of electricity, because they see that we have stable power generation," stated Fico in a video.
Agriculture Minister Richard Takáč (Smer-SD) also believes Slovakia could become a European leader in this field: "From the beginning of next year, we will be a net exporter of electricity, and I believe we can also make use of our abundant water reserves for this purpose. This means Slovakia could become an EU leader in this area in the future."
The state is considering the site planned for the Málinec pumped-storage hydroelectric plant as a possible location for a data center. Lucia Szabová of the Climate Coalition points out that such projects place extraordinary demands on local resources. As she stated, Slovakia has experienced severe droughts in recent months, and will continue to face them. “In my view, introducing technologies that many countries reject precisely because of their high energy consumption brings no benefit to the public," Szabová added.
Cybersecurity expert Andrej Alexiev believes the state is not prepared to take on such a leading role. "If we wanted to be a truly significant player in this field and build the kind of data centers the world demands, a single such center would consume approximately half the energy used by the entire country of Slovakia," says the expert.
According to the most pessimistic scenarios, artificial intelligence could consume nearly half of the world's electricity by 2050.
Source: STVR
