Google Turns to Nuclear to Power Energy-Hungry Data Centers

Tech giant Google signed a deal to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMR) that will power its global data centers and offices.

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Google has ordered the construction of multiple small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to power its energy-hungry data centers and global operations, the “world’s first” deal in which a tech company is commissioning the building of a nuclear power plant.

Kairos Power, the California-based start-up tasked with building the reactors, is expected to bring its first commercial reactor online by 2030 and develop more through 2035, Google said on Monday.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory permits, will generate up to 500 MW of new carbon-free energy, which Google will use to power its rapidly expanding data centers. Whether the new electricity will be added to the grid or used to power data centers directly remains unclear.

Google’s emissions grew by 13% last year compared to 2022, primarily due to AI’s growing energy demand, the company said in its annual environmental report released in July.

Google’s data centers account for around 7-10% of global data center electricity consumption, which the International Energy Agency (IEA) says represents 1-1.3% of global electricity demand. Owing to the expansion of AI services, Google’s data center electricity consumption last year grew 17% compared to 2022, a trend the company says is expected to continue in the future.

“We feel nuclear can play an important role in helping us to meet our demand, and helping us to meet our demand cleanly and round the clock,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director of energy and climate. He called the deal “a landmark for us at Google in our 15-year clean energy journey.”

Google, which is valued at approximately US$754 billion, aims to achieve net-zero emissions across all operations and value chain by 2030.

Owing to datasets and models becoming more complex, the energy needed to train and run AI models has skyrocketed in recent years, exacerbating greenhouse gas emissions. According to OpenAI researchers, the amount of computing power required to train cutting-edge AI models has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012. By 2040, it is expected that the emissions from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry as a whole will reach 14% of the global emissions, with data centres and communication networks accounting for the largest portion.

For this reason, tech companies are increasingly looking at nuclear and other types of clean energy to meet their data centers’ energy demands. Last month, Microsoft said it had signed a 20-year deal to purchase nuclear energy from the US nuclear power plant Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which enegry company Constellation committed to reviving. The plant, site of a nuclear accident in 1979, is expected to go back into service by 2028 after it was shut in 2019 due to operating losses.

Nuclear energy is clean and provides pollution-free power with no greenhouse gas emissions. Compared to all the energy alternatives we currently have on hand, nuclear is one of the cleanest sources.

SMRs are compact nuclear power plants that generate electricity on a smaller scale than traditional reactors. They are considered advantageous due to their potential for increased safety, cost-effectiveness, flexibility in deployment, and suitability for a wider range of applications, including remote locations and microgrids. However, critics of SMRs argue that they will be expensive in the long-term because they may not be able to achieve the same economy of scale as larger plants.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.