Google's CEO Pichai on Prioritizing Generative AI and Energy Solutions

TapTechNews October 3rd, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in an interview with the Nikkei, expounded on Google's philosophy and attitude towards prioritizing the development of generative AI, and also talked about Google's measures to meet the huge energy consumption demands of AI projects, considering powering data centers with nuclear power plants and increasing investment in solar and thermal energy, etc.

In order to better develop and operate its generative artificial intelligence projects, this American company has been continuously increasing its investment in data centers. Its parent company, Alphabet, saw its capital expenditure in the second quarter of 2024 increase by approximately 90% year-on-year, reaching 13.1 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 92.052 billion Chinese yuan) in terms of cash flow.

In our history, we have for the first time this fundamental technology that can run through everything we do today, he said when talking about generative AI, I think we should strive to seize this opportunity and do this well.

Google is committed to achieving net zero emissions for all its businesses and value chains by 2030, but the high energy consumption of AI poses a serious challenge to this goal, for example, its total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 increased by 48% in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents compared to 2019.

This is a very ambitious goal, Pichai said when talking about the zero-emission goal, We will still work very actively to achieve this goal. But obviously, the trajectory of AI investment has increased the difficulty of the required tasks. We are now considering additional investments such as solar energy and evaluating technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors.

For reference, Amazon announced in March this year that it will purchase electricity from nuclear power plants. In September this year, Microsoft announced that it will purchase electricity from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania (which was once famous for the meltdown accident that occurred in 1979).