Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared during a sitdown interview in Tokyo this week that he is considering using nuclear power plants to fuel energy demands at his company’s data centers.
Pichai shared his thoughts on using nuclear power with the media outlet Nikkei, saying they “are now looking at additional investments, be it solar, and evaluating technologies like small modular nuclear reactors, etc.”
This comes after Google shared earlier this year in its annual environment report that since 2019, the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have soared by 48%.
Fueling the rapid rise in emissions is the company’s push to be competitive in the Artificial Intelligence race. AI requires mass amounts of energy, as companies have to operate large data centers to keep the technology functioning.
For example, a single ChatGPT inquiry requires almost 10 times the amount of energy as a typical Google search. If the prompt requests the creation of an image, the energy output is more than 60 times greater.
Last month, Microsoft made a similar move to the one Google is considering, announcing that it would reopen Three Mile Island to power its data centers. Three Mile Island is where the US saw a nuclear meltdown in 1979, creating the largest domestic nuclear disaster in US history.
However, no one saw any detectable health defects from the incident, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.
Google’s goal is still to be net zero by the end of this decade, but with the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions, something will need to be done to meet that goal, as it also wants to continue with its AI ventures.
Pichai reaffirmed both of these points in his interview in Japan.
“It was a very ambitious target, and we are still going to be working very ambitiously towards it,” Pichai told Nikkei. “Obviously, the trajectory of AI investments has added to the scale of the task needed.”