Google has inked an agreement to produce the enormous quantities of electricity required to run its artificial intelligence (AI) data centres using tiny nuclear reactors.
According to the firm, it will begin operating the first reactor this decade and bring additional reactors online by 2035 as a result of the arrangement with Kairos Power.
The firms withheld information regarding the location of the plants and the estimated value of the deal.
Nuclear energy is becoming a more popular option for technology companies looking to power their massive data centres, which are the engines of artificial intelligence.
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“To facilitate AI technologies, the grid requires additional electricity sources,” stated Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director for energy and climate.
“By accelerating innovative technology, this agreement will enable everyone to benefit fully from AI and meet energy needs sustainably and reliably. According to Kairos executive Jeff Olson, the agreement with Google “is important to accelerate the commercialization of advanced nuclear energy by demonstrating the technical and market viability of a solution critical to decarbonizing power grids.”
Before the proposals can move further, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local authorities must both approve them.
US regulators granted California-based Kairos Power the first license to construct a new kind of nuclear reactor in fifty years last year.
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The business began building a demonstration reactor in Tennessee in July.
Rather than using water as a coolant, as standard nuclear plants do, the startup specializes in developing smaller reactors using molten fluoride salt.
The tech sector has grown more interested in nuclear power, which produces electricity almost entirely carbon-free and around the clock, as it looks to reduce emissions while using more energy.
Wall Street banking behemoth Goldman Sachs predicts that by the end of the decade, the world’s data centre energy usage will have more than doubled.
The US joined a group of nations last year at a UN climate change conference that wants to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by tripling their nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
On the other hand, detractors claim that nuclear power carries some risk and emits persistent radioactive waste.
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Microsoft signed an agreement last month to resume operations at the energy plant at Three Mile Island, the scene of the worst nuclear catastrophe to ever occur in the United States in 1979.
Amazon said in March that it would purchase a nuclear-powered data centre located in Pennsylvania.
According to Somnath Kansabanik of Rystad Energy, a research organization, “Google’s partnership with Kairos Power signals another major step in tech’s embrace of nuclear energy.”
