It is not a secret that fireworks eat kilowatts for breakfast.
A single image generated by AI consumes as much energy as it requires to load a smartphone. On a large scale, this demand for energy is seriously added. With the mass adoption of eager energy technology, the use of the energy of the data center in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts in 2022 to 5,341 by 2023, according to News put.
This has helped to catapult the data centers until the 11th largest electric consumer on the planet – just behind France’s energy requirements. At the current rate of energy consumption, data centers feeding AI should become the fifth largest energy consumer by 2026.
In this spirit, it is probably not surprising that Google seeks to build not only one, but on three new nuclear power plants to fuel its AI data centers.
The Elementl Power nuclear developer has just announced an agreement signed with Google to erect three project sites for “advanced nuclear energy”.
“Our collaboration with Elementl Power improves our ability to move at the speed necessary to respect this moment of AI and American innovation,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, energy manager of the Google data center.
The announcement does not say where nuclear sites will be located, but only that Google has initiated “development capital at the start of the stage to advance the development of three projects”. The financing of the technological company will be used to guarantee permits, energy transmission rights and job entrepreneurs, according to CNBC.
Once all the details in place, each project will open for a last series of fundraising to have things built – something that Elementl has not yet done.
This is not the only nuclear project on Google. Last year, the company concluded an agreement with the nuclear energy supplier Kairos Power to “deploy an American fleet of advanced nuclear energy projects totaling 500 (megawatts) by 2035.”
At the time, Kairos said that these sites will be located “in relevant service territories to provide energies specific to Google data centers, with the first deployment by 2030.”
Google could certainly use the boost. In July 2024, Google greenhouse gas emissions increased by 48% over five years, fueled by its frenzied AI adoption. Between 2023 and 2024 only, Google water consumption increased by 17% thanks to “the expansion of AI products and services (which) leads to an increase in workloads of the data center and the associated water imprint required to cool them effectively.”
If society needs Using all this energy is a different question. Although Google makes us believe that this is necessary to go to the age of AI, we have seen little concrete evidence that burning all this power – not to mention money – is worth it.
Until now, Google’s AI has strangled the Internet as we know it with scrambled slobe images, threatened death users and flooded its search engine with a hilarious AI assistant. Worse, nothing of this adoption of AI is organic.
Google justifies its energy expenses by silently forcing users of its products to use its owner AI, Gemini, while deliberately aggravating its search engine – a cycle which strengthens the idea that the masses are on board with AI, while simultaneously destroying any alternative.
It remains to be seen if Google will follow its Nuclear propulsion AI data centers.
It is probably not a good sign that Google’s technological rival, Microsoft, tears up mass data center contracts after concluding an agreement to restart the nuclear reactor to Three Mile Island – but hey, someone has to move the slope.
Learn more about AI data centers: Microsoft withdrawing new expensive data centers after its CEO expressed doubt about the value of AI
