America’s leading technology companies are now engaged in their own nuclear power race. Advertising and search giant Google has announced that it has signed the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMR), to be developed by Kairos Power.
By investing in its own nuclear energy facilities, Google has now joined the ranks of Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle in investing heavily in nuclear facilities to power the rollout of new services based around their prematurely launched artificial intelligence (AI) services. According to a recent report from US Madison Avenue investment bankers, Jeffries: “If it feels like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are suddenly everywhere, it’s because they are. GPUs drive computation across a wide range of industries and applications, from big data analytics to machine learning [AI].”
The report, How Data Centers Are Shaping the Future of Energy Consumption, adds: “Soaring GPU demand is rippling across the global economy, but no area has been more affected than data centers. They house the infrastructure to power, cool, and manage GPUs. Over the past two years, data center demand has skyrocketed, surging to over 30% annual growth in some key markets…Ten years ago, 15% demand growth in the [US] data center market meant about 250 megawatts. Today, the same growth equates to 2 gigawatts — eight times the demand — and growth was double that in 2022 and ‘23.
Google paints too-rosy picture of its AI rollout
According to Google: “The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth.”
But Google paints an extremely rosy picture of its initial AI rollout, which has been ridiculed for producing unintentionally hilarious images such as those of African Vikings, black SS officers, and Eighteenth-Century American founding fathers. So far, the only truly effective use of AI would appear to be cybercrime. AI has successfully enabled threat actors to create highly-convincing socially-delivered weaponized spear phishing e-mails on an industrial scale, targeting executives and key staff members across all sectors. Potentially-hostile nation-states such as China are also weaponizing AI for purposes of espionage and crippling critical infrastructure in countries like the US and the UK.
While AI will undoubtedly deliver truly tangible benefits, it is becoming increasingly debatable whether it can justify the many billions of dollars now being invested in the infrastructure needed to support the massive global rollout of AI.
