{"id":174991,"date":"2025-12-09T07:07:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/174991\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T07:07:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:07:10","slug":"google-cloud-ceo-lays-out-3-part-ai-plan-after-identifying-it-as-the-most-problematic-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/174991\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Cloud CEO lays out 3-part AI plan after identifying it as the ‘most problematic thing’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The immense electricity needs of AI computing was flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet\u2019s Google<\/a> Cloud to plan for how to source energy and how to use it, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the\u00a0Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco<\/a>\u00a0on Monday, he pointed out that the company\u2014a key enabler in the AI infrastructure landscape\u2014has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also knew that the the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,\u201d Kurian told Fortune\u2019sAndrew Nusca<\/a>. \u201cSo we designed our machines to be super efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

The International Energy Agency has estimated<\/a>\u00a0that some AI-focused data centers consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and some of the largest facilities under construction could even use 20 times that amount.<\/p>\n

At the same time, worldwide data center capacity will increase by 46% over the next two years, equivalent to a jump of almost 21,000 megawatts,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to real estate consultancy Knight Frank.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the Brainstorm event, Kurian laid out Google Cloud\u2019s three-pronged approach to ensuring that there will be enough energy to meet all that demand.<\/p>\n

First, the company seeks to be as diversified as possible in the kinds of energy that power AI computation. While many people say any form of energy can be used, that\u2019s actually not true, he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re running a cluster for training and you bring it up and you start running a training job, the spike that you have with that computation draws so much energy that you can\u2019t handle that from some forms of energy production,\u201d Kurian explained. <\/p>\n

The second part of Google Cloud\u2019s strategy is being as efficient as possible, including how it reuses energy within data centers, he added.<\/p>\n

In fact, the company uses AI in its control systems to monitor thermodynamic exchanges necessary in harnessing the energy that has already been brought into data centers.<\/p>\n

And third, Google Cloud is working on \u201csome new fundamental technologies to actually create energy in new forms,\u201d Kurian said without elaborating further.<\/p>\n

Earlier on Monday, utility company NextEra Energy<\/a> and Google Cloud said they are expanding their partnership and will develop new U.S. data center campuses that will include with new power plants as well.<\/p>\n

Tech leaders have warned that energy supply is critical to AI development alongside innovations in chips and improved language models.<\/p>\n

The ability to build data centers<\/a> is another potential chokepoint as well. Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang recently pointed out China\u2019s advantage on that front compared to the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to build a data center here in the United States, from breaking ground to standing up an AI supercomputer is probably about three years,\u201d\u00a0he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies<\/a> in late November. \u201cThey can build a hospital in a weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The immense electricity needs of AI computing was flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet\u2019s Google Cloud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,112387,8558,1686,367,11618,13070,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-174991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-brainstorm-ai","12":"tag-data-centers","13":"tag-electricity","14":"tag-google","15":"tag-google-ai","16":"tag-google-cloud","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}