“In the US, in highly regulated markets where we don’t have the opportunity to directly purchase power, we are working with our utility partners and the generators, to come together to figure out how we can bring these new technologies — nuclear may be one of them — to the grid,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data centre energy at Alphabet Inc’s Google.
She didn’t rule out the possibility of using nuclear energy in countries like Japan.
Other tech titans, including Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc, are already betting on nuclear energy as a source of stable, low-carbon power to meet skyrocketing electricity demand from their data centres, while also reducing dependence on fossil fuels to slash emissions. Microsoft has agreed to purchase power from the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, while Amazon recently bought a nuclear-powered data centre in the same US state.
For Google, having round-the-clock energy that isn’t intermittent is “critically important, as we think about long-term growth,” Corio said.
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