Google says we are facing a crisis in our competition with China

The US is facing a crisis in electricity capacity this week as the executives leading the energy strategy for the Alphabet Google Unit, compete with China to achieve the domination of artificial intelligence.

With the advent of the Chinese Deepseek artificial intelligence company, it transferred stocks in major electric power companies in late January on speculation that AI models would be cheaper and more efficient. However, Caroline Golin, Google’s head of global energy market development, said it needed more strength to keep up with Beijing.

“We are currently in a capacity crisis in this country and are currently in the AI ​​race with China,” Golin told a conference hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute in New York City on Tuesday.

alphabetThe Google Unit embarked on an ambitious goal of promoting round-the-clock with carbon-free renewables four years ago, but the company faced a major obstacle to forcing a turn towards nuclear power.

“We encountered a very harsh reality, which was insufficient to strengthen our data centers in the short term and potentially power them in the long term,” Golin said. states.

Google has noticed that the deployment of renewable energy may be causing grid instability and that utilities are investing in carbon-luminescent natural gas to back up the system, executives said. Wind power, especially solar, is rapidly increasing in the US, but its output depends on weather conditions.

“We learned the importance of developing clean corporate technology,” Golin said. “We realized that nuclear will become part of our portfolio.”

Google-Kairos trading

Last October, Google announced a contract to purchase 500 megawatts of electricity from a fleet of small modular nuclear reactors created by Kairos Power. The small modular reactor is an advanced design that promises to one day speed up the deployment of nuclear power, as it has a smaller footprint and a more streamlined manufacturing process.

Large US nuclear projects have long been hampered by delays, cost overruns and cancellations. To date, Google and Kairos in the US do not have a small operational modular reactor that plans to deploy the first reactor for more units to appear online in 2030.

Golin said the project with Kairos is currently in the first test pilot phase with other partners she does not disclose. Kairos received permission from the Nuclear Regulation Authority in November to build two 35-megawatt test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The goal is to get buy-ins from partners like utilities and create an approach that allows technology to be deployed widely, Golin said.

The nuclear industry is increasingly seeing it as a potential catalyst for reopening older reactors and building new reactors. Amazon announced it would invest in a small reactor worth over $500 million, two days after Google announced its agreement with Kairos.

Last September, Constellation energy He said he plans to return a nuclear reactor online on three miles island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft.

The need for reliable power

Golin said that nuclear is a long-term solution given the reality that nuclear is currently a race of artificial intelligence and needs electricity capacity to keep up with China. “Nuclear will not play in that field for the next five years,” she said.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency through an executive order on his first day in office. This order cited the reliability of electrical grids as a central concern.

Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he would use the emergency to facilitate the construction of AI data centre power plants.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an order on February 5th listing “commercializing affordable and abundant nuclear energy” as a priority.