Chowdhury reported in October 2024 that Google has struck a deal to use nuclear power in its push to supply clean electricity to its energy-intensive AI data centers.
Google is ready to go nuclear in the name of AI.
- The search giant struck a deal to bring new nuclear plants online to power its AI data centers, and
- It's the latest tech company to express interest in nuclear to meet AI's high energy demands.
The energy demands of the data centers behind the generative-AI boom are proving so great that they're pushing Big Tech firms into an unfamiliar position: becoming long-term customers of the nuclear industry. Google became the first tech giant to broker a deal for new nuclear power plants when it unveiled a partnership with Kairos Power on Monday. The deal involves the startup building small modular nuclear reactors for the search giant.
These reactors — including one Kairos began constructing in eastern Tennessee in July — are set to start coming online by 2030. Google said they should all be ready by 2035 and should enable up to 500 megawatts of "new 24/7 carbon-free power" to US electricity grids. Assuming continuous operation and average consumption levels, that's enough to power about 438,000 US households for a year.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted earlier this month that this was coming, saying in an interview that his company was "evaluating technologies like small modular nuclear reactors."
investment opportunities in nuclear power.Justin Sullivan/Getty
While the deal's terms haven't been disclosed, the significance of the arrangement is hard to overstate — and not just because the US has brought only three nuclear reactors online over the past two decades.
AI is pivoting Google and its rivals toward nuclear power as they search for a new solution to the tech world's growing energy problem.
Generative AI strains the energy sector
Big Tech companies are racing to build smarter AI, but this requires a lot of energy. Announcing the Kairos deal, Michael Terrell, Google's senior director of energy and climate operations, said the grid "needs new electricity sources" to support the energy needs of AI technologies the search giant is now heavily invested in.
Google revealed this summer just how energy-intensive its AI push has been. Its annual environmental report, published in July, said its emissions had risen by 13% year over year in 2023, driven by "increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." Except for a single endnote, that 86-page report didn't mention nuclear power. Google's Kairos deal is a sign that it's ready to consider all options in its search for a supply of clean electricity to its data centers. That's important as it looks to build smarter versions of its AI model, Gemini. Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton, argued on X that the deal "increases the odds that we will see AI models scale through at least 3 more generations/orders of magnitude (post GPT-5) to 2030."
Others have recognized this, too. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, the world's biggest tech companies have had to confront the fact that staying competitive in generative AI will require vast supplies of clean energy. By one estimate, a search request on OpenAI's chatbot demands about 10 times as much electricity as a general Google search. The large language models behind it make the computing power in data centers buzz and whirr intensively to produce cogent responses.
While solar and wind power offer clean means of electricity generation, some in the tech industry have suggested that they're not enough to meet the demands of AI.
For instance, Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, argued on X last month that AI data centers would have to be built next to nuclear power plants, as they can produce the continuous "gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity" needed.
"The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful long-distance distribution infrastructure," he wrote, adding that solar and wind are "nice" but not simple or cheap.
Microsoft's nuclear moves
Google's rival Microsoft signaled interest in nuclear power in September when it struck a 20-year power-supply agreement with Constellation in which the Baltimore-based energy company would reopen the nuclear plant on Three Mile Island.
The plant's second unit was shut down in 1979 after it became the site of the most serious nuclear meltdown on US soil, so the move from Microsoft is significant — even if it's reviving the first unit and not the second one. It's expected to come online by 2028 and provide over 800 megawatts of power, about enough to keep a small-to-midsize city running.
In March, Amazon bought a data center in Pennsylvania from Talen Energy for $650 million. The center is powered by the nuclear Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. The OpenAI boss Sam Altman said at Davos this year that an energy "breakthrough" driven by greater investment in nuclear fusion would be needed to accelerate AI developments. Altman personally invested $375 million in the fusion power company Helion Energy in 2021.
The prospect of the energy source taking on a greater role in Big Tech's operations becomes even more significant considering the nuclear industry's decades of stagnation due to delayed projects. That doesn't seem like a deterrent, however. Big Tech firms look all in on AI. Expect them to be all in on energy sources to keep the technology ticking.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Managed by I2M Consulting, LLC