Google is Building Three New Nuclear Plants for Its Extremely Power-Hungry AI

It's no secret that artifiical intelligence eats kilowatts for breakfast. Just one AI-generated image consumes as much energy as it takes to charge a smartphone. At scale, that energy demand is seriously adding up. With the mass-adoption of the energy-hungry tech, data center power usage in North America surged from 2,688 megawatts in 2022 to 5,341 by 2023, according to MIT News. That helped catapult data centers up to the 11th largest electrical consumer on the planet — just behind the energy demands of France. At the current rate of energy consumption, the data centers powering AI are projected to become the fifth largest energy consumer by 2026. With this in mind, it's probably no surprise that Google is looking to build not just one, but three new nuclear power plants to fuel its AI data centers. The nuclear developer Elementl Power just announced a signed agreement with Google to erect three project sites for "advanced nuclear energy." "Our collaboration with Elementl Power e ... Read full article.