Name: Google signs deal to build seven nuclear reactors to satisfy AI energy hunger | DW News
Uploaded: 2024-10-17T21:44:05.000Z
Duration: 6 min 1 s
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Now the AI revolution is reshaping our world at breakneck speed. The possibilities seem endless but are actually being limited by one very important thing, electricity. To put the problem into perspective, asking chat GPT a question uses 30 times more power than a regular search query on Google. If everyone on the planet let AI into their lives, that would require too much for power grids to handle. So tech companies are going nuclear. In March, Amazon acquired a nuclear power data center in Pennsylvania. Microsoft followed suit by signing a deal to reactivate the old Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear power accident in US history. And Google is the latest tech giant to press the nuclear button.

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It signed a deal to build seven small nuclear reactors to power its AI data centers. The first is scheduled to go online this decade, with the rest following through 2035. To talk more about this, I'm joined by an expert in everything AI. She's a senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington DC.

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Lindsay Gorman, welcome to the day. Thanks for having me. Is there any alternative to going nuclear if we want to fully realize AI's potential?

Well, one thing that's become increasingly clear as this AI revolution takes hold is that the power consumption needs are just astronomical. One study recently found that only AI uses could make up half a percent of the entire worldwide electricity use. So this is an enormous amount of power required. And just to give a benchmark, that's the rough equivalent that Argentina uses for its entire electricity supply. And the push towards nuclear, I think, is twofold. First, to make up for this exorbitant demand as these tech giants are building out new data centers, that's pushing the needs up to support AI. At the same time, though, there is a push towards cleaner sources of energy. And as the Biden administration and the U.S. government has put forward, nuclear is one of a suite of technologies, along with wind and solar, that the U.S. government is trying to push as part of its climate goals. And it's not just the United States, but other countries around the world as well are trying to build out this clean energy for the future. So it's not that nuclear is the only tool in the toolkit. But as we're trying to move away from fossil fuels at the same time as we have this explosion in need, that's why you're seeing this turn towards new and advanced nuclear technologies. And Google wants to have its seven reactors up and running by 2035. Won't that be too late at the current rate of development?

Well, I think what Google is banking on is that the current rate is only going to explode, that the needs that we anticipate today are only going to compound if AI is as important and as revolutionary as it's expected to be. I don't think this is going to be an energy need for the next five years, but perhaps the next 50. Can you explain why AI sucks up so much power?

Yeah, it's a great question. And the long and short of it is that AI runs on data. And the way these artificial intelligence models work is that in order to present you with human-like reasoning and the responses that we're accustomed to on chat GPT, first, the model needs to ingest massive, massive quantities of data. For example, in the case of open AI and chat GPT, it's scraping much of the internet, the whole reported history of human output and written output to mimic those responses and create an AI-generated human-like reasoning.

Can I just interrupt? Are you saying that this happens every time we ask it a question? It goes whoosh across the whole of the internet?

Not every time we ask it a question. Now, the models that you've seen released, first it was chat GPT, then there's GPT-4, and then the next generation models that come out.

Those are the breakpoints of we train it on a certain dataset, and then we release the model.

So it's not each query that is scraping the entire internet in real time. But in order to build that model to give you those queries, it is scraping and training on all of that information. And that's processing all of that information, bringing it all together and training the model on all of it is what sucks up just so much power and so much electricity uses as these data centers that store the processors on which these models are trained need to suck up all this power.

I just want to, okay, we've got less than a minute. Can you see Google needing all seven nuclear reactors it's ordering? Because I wonder about them opening a secondary market as either a power supplier to other computer companies or indeed selling power to domestic consumers.

 Yeah, I mean, they say that AI is an electricity, AI is the new oil, and data is the new oil. And I think there's something to it now. And Google's not alone in this. OpenAI, Sam Altman has tried to move into these markets as well. So I think we're going to see a fusion of both energy for AI and then eventually also AI for energy. Fascinating. Thank you for guiding us through that. Lindsay Gorman from the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Thank you so much. Thanks.