In what is being called a “first partnership of its kind”, Google will collaborate with developers to build a data center powered by renewable energy generated at the site.
Its partnership Energy company Intersect Power and investment firm TPG are partnering with Rise Climate on a $20 billion initiative to develop an unspecified number of “industrial parks” across the US this decade. The first is scheduled to be partially operational by 2026 and completed by 2027.
If successful, it would lead to a major change in the way data centers are generally built and operated. Google and its competitors are racing to find clean sources of power for energy-hungry AI data centers. But the American power mix is still Fossil fuels dominateConnecting new data centers to the power grid results in more pollution. With this new partnership, Google can solve that problem by connecting directly to solar and wind farms and batteries for renewable energy.
“The scale of AI presents an opportunity to completely rethink data center development.”
“To realize the potential of AI, the increase in electricity demand must be met by new, clean energy sources. The scale of AI presents an opportunity to completely rethink data center development,” Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy at Google, said in a. Press release,
Google and its partners are coy about the details at this time. The partnership aims to create “gigawatts” of new capacity, but Google and Intersect declined to say exactly how much capacity. They are still figuring out how many data centers and renewable energy power plants they plan to build and where they will be located. But tech companies should think about bringing data centers to places where renewable energy is abundant, explains Sheldon Kimber, CEO of Intersect Power. The Verge,
“It’s time for the industry to really evolve with a power-first mindset,” says Kimber. “And when you start with electricity first, you start with renewable energy, and you start with high solar and wind areas in the country.”
Doing so may divert data center growth away from where it has historically been concentrated. nearby 70 percent internet traffic For example, Virginia's “Data Center Alley” runs through it. increasing demand for electricity is from AI Extending the lifespan of nearby old coal-fired power plantsConcerns are being raised about data centers exacerbating climate change and worsening air quality.
“Data Center Alley and the current large data center market, they're hard to power, right?” Kimber says. Affordable energy costs attract tech companies to Virginia and similar data center locations. But Kimber says there isn't enough land available for renewable energy. Their proximity to densely populated areas (another reason why so many data centers were originally concentrated in these locations) also makes building new energy infrastructure more difficult.
Compared to traditional data centers built to preserve people's emails and videos, latency isn't as big an issue for the new facilities used to train AI. With this new partnership Google should be a little freer to chase the wind and the sun.
The other big difference in such a deal is that Google is essentially telling the utilities that it will take care of their power needs and the energy infrastructure for the new data centers. Intersect Power will develop, own and operate the co-located power plant. Google will either build its own data center at the same location or rent the data center premises from Intersect Power and buy the power generated from it. This should relieve some pressure on utilities as they will not have to pay for new infrastructure to accommodate the data center, which could otherwise result in higher utility bills for customers in the area.
Intersect Power also announced $800 million in funding led by Google and TPG Rise Climate. Of course, this does not mean that everything is going smoothly going forward. Intersect Power will have to raise the remaining funds required to build the industrial park. Facilities will still need to be connected to the local power grid – as a backup source of electricity – which could take year for approval,
But the “bring your own power” strategy is going to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, which is desperately needed as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels make climate disasters worse and push tech companies further away from their climate goals. Google's carbon footprint is 48 percent increase from 2019Despite setting a target of halving pollution by the end of the decade.