Google is one step closer to reaching its nuclear ambitions now that it’s working with public power utility Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to purchase electricity from a next-generation reactor. It’s the first power purchase agreement for technology this advanced that a US utility has made, according to the companies. The plan is for TVA to…
Blockchain technology can help modernize the US electrical grid by marshaling human labor and stranded resources to create decentralized energy infrastructure, according to Cosmo Jiang, a general partner at venture capital firm Pantera. “All of civilization from the beginning of time has been built on the coordination of incentives, and blockchain is just a new…
Senate Republicans today passed a sweeping spending bill that narrowly avoided punitive tax measures on renewable energy but still threatens to stall its growth in the US. After wrangling over hundreds of amendments for more than 24 hours in a so-called “vote-a-rama” on Monday and Tuesday, Senate Republicans advanced the bill with provisions that make…
Tech company Amazon recently signed a deal with Talen Energy, a power infrastructure and provider company, for 1,920 megawatts (MW) of nuclear energy to fuel Amazon Web servers and AI data centers in Pennsylvania through the year 2042. According to an announcement from Talen, the energy will be produced at the company’s Susquehanna nuclear facility…
Apple’s smart home didn’t get a single nod during the WWDC keynote, but it turns out there are some interesting developments coming to the Home app around energy management. In a video posted to the Apple developer site this week, the company outlined its new EnergyKit framework, which allows developers to integrate energy data from…
What was once ridiculous is now possible. Elon Musk, the richest person in the history of the world, has become President Donald Trump’s attack dog. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have unprecedented access to the government’s data and computer system. Earlier this week, that came to include systems in the Department of…
A fledgling startup is setting out to become one of Europe’s first “AI compute” hyperscalers, with renewable energy playing a pivotal part in its pitch to prospective customers. The AI goldrush has spurred unprecedented demand for “compute,” which refers to the processing power, infrastructure and resources needed for tasks such as running algorithms, executing machine…
Tech giants are increasingly eyeing nuclear reactors to power their energy-hungry data centers. Amazon and Microsoft each inked major deals this year with nuclear power plants in the US. And both Microsoft and Google have shown interest in next-generation small modular reactors that are still in development. New AI data centers need a lot of…
Google has issued its 2024 Environmental Report, a more than 80-page document describing all of the massive company’s efforts to apply tech to environmental issues and to mitigate its own contributions. But it totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care…