you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

The company has signed agreements to buy over 22 gigawatts of power from sources including solar, wind, geothermal, and advanced nuclear projects since 2010.

None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK. They're mostly in planning stages.

The above isn't all to run AI, of course. Nobody was thinking about datacenters just for AI training in 2010. But to be clear, there are 94 nuclear power plants in the US, and a rule of thumb is that they produce 1GW each. So Google is taking up the equivalent of roughly one quarter of the entire US nuclear power industry, but doing it with solar/wind/geothermal that could be used to drop our fossil fuel dependence elsewhere.

How much of that is used to run AI isn't clear here, but we know it has to be a lot.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK.

    ...and they won't be for at least 5-10 years. In the meantime they'll just use public infrastructure and then when their generation plans fall through they'll just keep doing that.

  • source
  • parent