Google Goes Solar as Grid Can't Power its Future Datacenters
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Google believes the US electricity grid can't deliver the energy needed to power datacenters that deliver AI services, so has formed an alliance to build industrial parks powered by clean energy, at which it will build "gigawatts of datacenter capacity" across the nation.
The search megalith announced its plan on Wednesday. Google president Ruth Porat wrote that the US is poised to enjoy strong economic growth thanks to AI, increased manufacturing activity, and the electrification of transport and other industries. But Porat thinks those opportunities could be missed due to the wonky electricity grid, which she wrote has "not kept pace with the country's economic growth opportunity" and is sometimes "unable to accommodate load increases."
Google's response is a deal with solar energy firm Intersect Power, and financier TPG Rise Climate, to build industrial parks next to renewable energy generation facilities that Porat wrote will be "purpose-built and right-sized for the datacenter." Google will build datacenters at those parks - meaning they have a long-term customer from day one - and believes it can build bit barns faster under this arrangement.
[...] Google and TPG are investing $800 million into Intersect to fund the deal. Intersect noted in its press release announcing the partnership that the first co-located clean energy project with Google is slated to come online in 2026.
[...] Despite Google's admission that its CO2 emissions rose 13 percent between 2022 and 2023, Google maintains AI is not the reason for the increase as it remains a small fraction of its datacenter workloads.
[...] Google also signed a deal with Kairos Power in October to outfit future datacenters with small modular reactors (SMRs), making it just one of many tech giants turning to nuclear power to feed its facilities. As we've noted in multiple stories of late, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are investing heavily in the power of the atom to power future datacenters.
Kairos hasn't built a working reactor molten salt SMR yet, and only has plans to get a test facility up and running by 2030. There aren't even many SMRs in the world - China, Russia, and Japan each host one functional unit, despite several groups working on other designs.
And let's not get started on the scarcity of the fuel needed to power such reactors: high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that powers SMRs and other next-gen nuclear reactors is only produced at scale in China and Russia, and the US can only move so fast to commercialize domestic production.
While it waits, Google has poured additional cash into carbon capture technology to offset its greenhouse gas emissions - but the direct air capture provider behind it may not be able to scale up until the 2030s.
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