Essay by Eric Worrall
Accused of signing zero carbon nuclear deals with no timeline, scanty details.
Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal
Chocolate Factory promises early-stage capital to atomic upstart Elementl
Brandon Vigliarolo
Wed 7 May 2025 // 19:02 UTCGoogle has signed a strategic agreement with nuclear project developer Elementl Power to support the early development of three potential fission reactor sites in the US.
But with no selected reactor tech and no construction timeline, the announcement sounds more like a handwaving exercise to distract onlookers from the massive amount of energy that will be expended as Google and other companies race to capitalize on the AI boom.
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But as The Register pointed out recently, Google’s nuclear plans – along with those backed by Meta, Amazon, and others – may be too little too late to address the growing concerns that there isn’t enough power to fuel the growing demand from datacenters and AI. Experts predict an “unprecedented” spike in demand, driven in part by datacenter and AI growth, that could require 3,500 TWh of new energy generation by 2027.
Google’s own plans for AI expansion are gigantic. Google parent company Alphabet saidin its most recent earnings call last month that it intended to invest $75 billion in CapEx in 2025, much of that going to servers and datacenters to support the expansion of Google services and DeepMind AI products. At least a portion of the electricity going into those data centers is generated by burning fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming: Google itself admitted in its 2024 environmental report AI investments were a big factor as Google’s carbon emissions to increase by 13 percent year-over-year, writing “Overall, our total GHG emissions increased by 13% — highlighting the challenge of reducing emissions while compute intensity increases and we grow our technical infrastructure investment to support this AI transition.” Overall, the report said, its emissions grew 48% between 2019 and 2024.
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Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_nuclear_deal/
The green movement is finished. The AI revolution has barely begun, yet the momentum behind AI is already unstoppable.
Wait until advanced AI powered consumer devices – robotic household servants which can mind the kids, take care of the gardening, or provide for other needs – start penetrating the consumer market at scale. There is no way the gargantuan energy needs of the AI required to power such consumer tech will be satisfied by handwaving agreements with early stage nuke startups, it will be all hands on deck for new dispatchable energy capacity in whatever form is most readily available.
Nice logo. Be especially funny if you used Gemini to create it.
If one actually wants dispatchable power, conventional thermal or nuclear thermal are the only real choices. Weirdly, Google’s spell check does not recognize “dispatchable” as a word. Or “lawfare”.
Two things:
First it’s good to see to see the climate angle so easily dismissed peacefully.
And second, if this is what gets more action on new nuclear installations, I’m good with that.
We always knew that hypocrisy was strong in the tech world, but no need to harp on that. We should just celebrate the moment and use it to affirm the need for reliable power for all users, for convenience or heavy industry or even for unrestricted EV charging, if that’s your thing.
I don’t think much of AI but it doesn’t matter what I think of it, it is here and not going anywhere. However the demands required by AI should not have priority to our current energy supply. AI needs to get busy helping to fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear energy beginning right now. They also need to invest big time building new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Wind and solar need to be removed from the grid, they are nothing more than speed bumps and detours on our path to abundant, reliable and affordable energy.
“Wait until advanced AI powered consumer devices – robotic household servants which can mind the kids, take care of the gardening, or provide for other needs – start penetrating the consumer market at scale.”
Charging EVs at home is thought to be a huge issue as the power system is not designed for such large, additional power demands.
Should the AI powered devices become ubiquitous in households, how much power will they require, placing further stress on an already inadequate power distribution system?
Let’s hope high power lithium-based batteries are not installed in these devices as we have enough issues with them already.
As reported on this site 8 years ago their own engineers said renewables won’t work.
As reported on this site in 2014 their own engineers said renewables won’t work.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
“Wait until advanced AI powered consumer devices – robotic household servants which can mind the kids, take care of the gardening, or provide for other needs – start penetrating the consumer market at scale.”
And then there are all the electric cars, trucks and busses …
A reasonably educated person with a yellow pad and a pencil could have shown (as many did) how unrealistic the predicted green carbon-free power plans were … in the few places where there were actual plans with numbers and costs and all that …
I thought the real uses for AI were, doing away with the need for human workers and the total surveillance society. Seeing the apparent ease with which hackers can disrupt systems, it feels like a dystopia horror story.
Two points:
First, “consumer” AI will not be a huge driver of power demand. AI breaks into 2 distinct tasks, Training where a model is built and taught by feeding it mountains of curated data (pictures of dogs labeled as to breed etc.) so it can ”learn” (what german shepherds and poodles look like for example). THIS is enormously compute and power intensive and is what drives the big data center power budget. The other task is Inference where queries are run through a trained model. This can run on a much less powerful system and leverages the magic of digital intelligence to COPY and share the trained learning for just a few cents letting everyone carry around their own personal Einstein. And this is what most consumer AI will be doing I expect.
Second, I believe this AI gold rush will lead to the rapid demise of global warming alarmism because the “Guardians of Truth” in the tech world who control most all data access and news feeds nowadays have virtue signaled their moral superiority by censoring climate realism as articulated on WUWT and driving around in EVs, but will quickly abandon these false principles in pursuit of more billions. And I suspect many quite willingly as people who study STEM actually learn to understand data and AI has taught them quickly just how much bad data will screw you up (witness Google’s infamous black NAZIs stupidity). So they will become willing anti-alarmists and rationality on this topic will become ever more accessible, and in fact I suspect actively promoted as greed trumps false morality.
The people with money (Google et al) are spending it on nuclear. The people without money — or with taxpayer money — are spending it on windmills and solar farms.
“robotic household servants which can mind the kids, take care of the gardening, or provide for other needs – start penetrating the consumer market at scale”
I doubt that’ll ever happen- or, maybe another century from now.
What else are they to do? They have to pay lip service to the mania, so why not promise to do something a long way away that sounds vaguely progressive. Or should they promise to install lots of turbines? And then get criticized for not doing it?
So it’s energiewende vs CIAggle bots now?
Many good things may come from it. Many nasty things may come from the winner establishing a precedent, too. Quoth Kissinger, «It’s a pity they can’t both lose».