ech companies are reading the tea leaves on AI’s energy problem.
Google parent company Alphabet agreed to acquire Intersect Power, a developer of clean energy, for $4.75 billion in cash, the companies announced on Monday. The deal will help Google with its ambitious data center goals as the entire tech industry is in a mad dash for more compute capacity.
Along with acquiring the Intersect team, the deal gives Google “multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects in development, or under construction.”
“Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive US innovation and leadership,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.
Google’s acquisition marks the latest in a string of energy deals and developments as AI companies reckon with the problem that their innovations are creating.
- Investors have taken a renewed interest in clean energy-related technologies, with tech giants like Google and Amazon backing geothermal, nuclear and fusion energy companies.
- Some are targeting off-planet options: Google, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are all exploring ways to deploy data centers in space, and Nvidia-backed Starcloud has already trained an AI model in orbit. (However, the economics of zero-gravity AI factories might not add up.)
Multiple estimates have shown that we’re in for a massive power shortfall as a result of AI data centers. While these investments might push the energy transition in the right direction, these firms are racing against the clock.