Big Tech turns to nuclear to meet green targets

Google’s commitment to carbon-free energy with nuclear power

Google is the latest Big Tech player to signal a move into nuclear power to meet the growing need for carbon-free energy to power the explosion of data centre growth.

In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google’s carbon emissions had risen by 48% since 2019, fuelled largely by the expansion of AI-related data usage.

He added that the company was investigating the possibility of harnessing power from small modular nuclear reactors to enable it to meet its plans to be net zero by 2030.

Google’s move follows a series of announcements from technology giants about leveraging nuclear power to meet their projected energy demands.

Earlier this year, Amazon revealed that its cloud service subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, had bought a nuclear-powered data centre in Pennsylvania to enable it to reach net zero by 2040.

Microsoft stepped into nuclear with its project to reactivate the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which had been producing energy until 2019 when its former owner shut the loss-making operation.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has signalled that nuclear is a good option to meet the AI company’s growing data centre needs.

Why nuclear energy is key for AI data centre sustainability

Carbon-free power sources have become more critical as the companies have come under a barrage of criticism for greenwashing and under-reporting energy usage by data centres. The concern is that expanding data centre energy consumption is jeopardising big tech companies’ sustainability plans.

According to International Energy Agency research, data centres are hugely energy-intensive operations, accounting for 1-1.5% of global electricity demand.

Data centre energy use is expected to double by 2026, with the IEA revealing earlier this year that data centre energy consumption reached 460TWh in 2022 and could rise to over 1,000 TWh by 2026, driven by fast-rising AI and cryptocurrency workloads.

Megatech leaders have recently been scrambling to find alternative power sources for data centres, from nuclear to solar and geothermal power. Pichai confirmed that the company was looking to expand traditional renewables.

Going nuclear: Digital Transformation at EDF’s Hinkley Point C

However, he underlined the importance of nuclear energy, a reliable source not subject to the same peaks and troughs of supply as some renewables.

Although Google’s Pichai didn’t detail where the nuclear sources would be based, it’s understood that the US and Japan would be most likely.

Google’s global head of data centre energy, Amanda Peterson Corio, has also indicated that the company is looking carefully at nuclear options, telling Bloomberg:

“In the US, in highly regulated markets where we don’t have the opportunity to directly purchase power, we are working with our utility partners and the generators to come together to figure out how we can bring these new technologies — nuclear may be one of them — to the grid.”

Read more: The Rolls-Royce of use cases: quantum computing applications in industry