Google partners with Elementl Power on nuclear energy sites as power demand for AI grows
is partnering with
Elementl Power
on three project sites for advanced nuclear energy as the energy required to power burgeoning
artificial intelligence
projects rises sharply.
Under the agreement announced Wednesday, Google will provide capital for the projects, which the companies say will each produce 600 megawatts of power capacity. No dollar figure for Google's investment was given.
"Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and
American innovation
," said
Amanda Peterson Corio
, Google's head of data center energy.
Google and Elementl said they will collaborative with utility and regulated power companies to identify and advance new projects.
"We look forward to working with Google to execute these projects and bring safe, carbon-free, baseload electricity to the grid," said Elementl Power Chairman and CEO Chris Colbert.
U.S. states have been positioning themselves to meet the tech industry's power needs as policymakers consider expanding subsidies and gutting regulatory obstacles.
Last year, 25 states passed legislation to support advanced nuclear energy, and lawmakers this year have introduced over 200 bills supportive of nuclear energy, according to the trade association Nuclear Energy Institute.
Advanced reactor designs from competing firms are filling up the federal government's regulatory pipeline as the industry touts them as a reliable, climate-friendly way to meet electricity demands from tech giants desperate to power their fast-growing artificial intelligence platforms.
In October, Amazon announced that it was investing in small nuclear reactors, just two days after a similar announcement by Google.
A month before that, Constellation Energy, the owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said it it planned to restart the reactor so tech giant Microsoft could secure power to supply its data centers.
Three Mile Island, located on the Susquehanna River just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear power accident, in 1979.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft also have been investing in solar and wind technologies, which make electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions.
Elementl Power was founded in 2022.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
15 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Donald Trump admin building own chatbot to boost govt tech with AI tools: Report
The Trump administration is developing a new website called ' and an API meant to 'accelerate government innovation with AI,' according to 404 Media, which found a draft version of the site with code posted to GitHub. Even though Musk is no longer involved in the government and is publicly feuding with the President, the plan shows that some of DOGE's ideas are still being used.(Pexels) The project seems to be led by the General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Services, which is run by Thomas Shedd, a former engineer at Tesla, according to As per New York Times, Shedd is connected to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and has publicly supported using AI to spot fraud, review government contracts, and build 'AI coding agents' to write software for federal agencies. The draft version of uncovered by 404 Media (the live link currently redirects to the White House website), outlines three tools as part of the platform and says they are 'powered by the best in American AI.' These include an AI chat assistant, an API that connects to models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, and a dashboard for reviewing how AI is used across agencies. According to 404, the full site was supposed to go live on July 4th. Also Read: Trump rips apart Musk in brutal attack, calls DOGE 'a monster' that may 'go back and eat Elon' Elon Musk no longer involved in the government Even though Musk is no longer involved in the government and is publicly feuding with the President, the plan shows that some of DOGE's ideas are still being used. Shedd, described as a close Musk associate, who has pushed for the GSA to 'operate like a software startup' and has promoted the use of AI tools that other agencies would be required to adopt. The draft site also mentioned plans to work with Amazon Bedrock, Meta's LLaMA, and other FedRAMP-approved vendors, though some of the AI models mentioned do not currently have official government clearance. Federal workers raised concerns Some federal workers have raised concerns about the AI project. Internal reaction has been 'pretty unanimously negative,' with employees worried about possible security issues, the risk of bugs affecting key systems, and the chance that AI could suggest canceling important contracts.
Mint
19 minutes ago
- Mint
Technobabble: We need a whole new vocabulary to keep up with the evolution of AI
The artificial intelligence (AI) news flow does not stop, and it's becoming increasingly obscure and pompous. China's MiniMax just spiked efficiency and context length, but we are not gasping. Elon Musk says Grok will 'redefine human knowledge," but is that a new algorithm or just hot air? Andrej Karpathy's 'Software 3.0" sounds clever but lacks real-world bite. Mira Murati bet $2 billion on 'custom models," a term so vague it could mean anything. And only by testing Kimi AI's 'Researcher" did we get why it's slick and different. Technology now sprints past our words. As machines get smarter, our language lags. Buzzwords, recycled slogans and podcast quips fill the air but clarify nothing. This isn't just messy, it's dangerous. Investors chase vague terms, policymakers regulate without definitions and the public confuses breakthroughs with sci-fi. Also Read: An AI gadget mightier than the sword? We're in a tech revolution with a vocabulary stuck in the dial-up days. We face a generational shift in technology without a stable vocabulary to navigate it. This language gap is not a side issue. It is a core challenge that requires a new discipline: a fierce scepticism of hype and a deep commitment to the details. The instinct to simplify is a trap. Once, a few minutes was enough to explain breakthrough apps like Google or Uber. Now, innovations in robotics or custom silicon resist such compression. Understanding OpenAI's strategy or Nvidia's product stack requires time, not sound-bites. We must treat superficial simplicity as a warning sign. Hot areas like AI 'agents' or 'reasoning layers' lack shared standards or benchmarks. Everyone wants to sell a 'reasoning model,' but no one agrees on what that means or how to measure it. Most corporate announcements are too polished to interrogate and their press releases are not proof of defensible innovation. Extraordinary claims need demos, user numbers and real-world metrics. When the answers are fuzzy, the claim is unproven. In today's landscape, scepticism is not cynicism. It is discipline. This means we must get comfortable with complexity. Rather than glossing over acronyms, we must dig in. Modern tech is layered with convenient abstractions that make understanding easier, but often too easy. A robo-taxi marketed as 'full self-driving' or a model labelled 'serverless' demands that we look beneath the surface. Also Read: Productivity puzzle: Solow's paradox has come to haunt AI adoption We don't need to reinvent every wheel, but a good slogan should never be an excuse for missing what is critical. The only way to understand some tools is to use them. A new AI research assistant, for instance, only feels distinct after you use it, not when you read a review of what it can or cannot accomplish. In this environment, looking to the past or gazing towards the distant future is a fool's errand. History proves everything and nothing. You can cherry-pick the dot-com bust or the advent of electricity to support any view. It's better to study what just happened than to force-fit it into a chart of inevitability. The experience of the past two years has shattered most comfortable assumptions about AI, compute and software design. The infographics about AI diffusion or compute intensity that go viral on the internet often come from people who study history more than they study the present. It's easier to quote a business guru than to parse a new AI framework, but we must do the hard thing: analyse present developments with an open mind even when the vocabulary doesn't yet exist. Also Read: Colleagues or overlords? The debate over AI bots has been raging but needn't The new 'Nostradami' of artificial intelligence: This brings us to the new cottage industry of AI soothsaying. Over the past two years, a fresh crop of 'laws' has strutted across conference stages and op-eds, each presented as the long-awaited Rosetta Stone of AI. We're told to obey Scaling Law (just add more data), respect Chinchilla Law (actually, add exactly 20 times more tokens) and reflect on the reanimated Solow Paradox (productivity still yawns, therefore chatbots are overrated). When forecasts miss the mark, pundits invoke Goodhart's Law (metrics have stopped mattering) or Amara's Law (overhype now, under-hype later). The Bitter Lesson tells us to buy GPUs (graphic processing units), not PhDs. Cunningham's Law says wrong answers attract better ones. Our favourite was when the Victorian-era Jevons' Paradox was invoked to argue that a recent breakthrough wouldn't collapse GPU demand. We're not immune to this temptation and have our own Super-Moore Law; it has yet to go viral. Also Read: AI as infrastructure: India must develop the right tech These laws and catchphrases obscure more than they reveal. The 'AI' of today bears little resemblance to what the phrase meant in the 1950s or even late 2022. The term 'transformer," the architecture that kicked off the modern AI boom, is a prime example. Its original 2017 equation exists now only in outline. The working internals of today's models—with flash attention, rotary embeddings and mixture-of-experts gating—have reshaped the original methods so thoroughly that the resulting equations resemble the original less than general relativity resembles Newton's laws. This linguistic mismatch will only worsen as robotics grafts cognition onto actuators and genomics borrows AI architecture for DNA editing. Our vocabulary, built for a slower era, struggles to keep up. Also Read: Rahul Matthan: AI models aren't copycats but learners just like us Beneath the noise, a paradox remains: staying genuinely current is both exceedingly difficult and easier than ever. It's difficult because terminology changes weekly and breakthroughs appear on preprint servers, not in peer-reviewed journals. However, it's easier because we now have AI tools that can process vast amounts of information, summarize dense research and identify core insights with remarkable precision. Used well, these technologies can become the most effective way to understand technology itself. And that's how sensible investment in innovation begins: with a genuine grasp of what's being invested in. The author is a Singapore-based innovation investor for GenInnov Pte Ltd
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
US tariffs on European goods likely to disrupt world's largest trade ties
America's largest trade partner, the European Union, is among the entities awaiting word Monday on whether US President Donald Trump will impose punishing tariffs on their goods, a move economists have warned would have repercussions for companies and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump imposed a 20 per cent import tax on all EU-made products in early April as part of a set of tariffs targeting countries with which the United States has a trade imbalance. Hours after the nation-specific duties took effect, he put them on hold until July 9 at a standard rate of 10 per cent to quiet financial markets and allow time for negotiations. Expressing displeasure the EU's stance in trade talks, however, the president said he would jack up the tariff rate for European exports to 50per cent. A rate that high could make everything from French cheese and Italian leather goods to German electronics and Spanish pharmaceuticals much more expensive in the US. The EU, whose 27 member nations operate as a single economic bloc, said its leaders hoped to strike a deal with the Trump administration. Without one, the EU said it was prepared to retaliate with tariffs on hundreds of American products, ranging from beef and auto parts to beer and Boeing airplanes. Here are important things to know about trade between the United States and the European Union. US-EU trade is enormous A lot of money is at stake in the trade talks. The EU's executive commission describes the trade between the US and the EU as "the most important commercial relationship in the world. The value of EU-US trade in goods and services amounted to 1.7 trillion euros ($2 trillion) in 2024, or an average of 4.6 billion euros a day, according to EU statistics agency Eurostat. The biggest US export to Europe is crude oil, followed by pharmaceuticals, aircraft, automobiles, and medical and diagnostic equipment. Europe's biggest exports to the US are pharmaceuticals, cars, aircraft, chemicals, medical instruments, and wine and spirits. EU sells more to the US than vice versa Trump has complained about the EU's 198 billion-euro ($233 billion) trade surplus in goods, which shows Americans buy more stuff from European businesses than the other way around. However, American companies fill some of the gap by outselling the EU when it comes to services such as cloud computing, travel bookings, and legal and financial services. The US services surplus took the nation's trade deficit with the EU down to 50 billion euros ($59 billion), which represents less than 3per cent of overall US-EU trade. What are the issues dividing the two sides? Before Trump returned to office, the U.S. and the EU maintained a generally cooperative trade relationship and low tariff levels on both sides. The U.S. rate averaged 1.47 per cent for European goods, while the EU's averaged 1.35 per cent for American products. But the White House has taken a much less friendly posture toward the longstanding US ally since February. Along with the fluctuating tariff rate on European goods Trump has floated, the EU has been subject to his administration's 50 per cent tariff on steel and aluminum and a 25per cent tax on imported automobiles and parts. Trump administration officials have raised a slew of issues they want to see addressed, including agricultural barriers such as EU health regulations that include bans on chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef. Trump has also criticized Europe's value-added taxes, which EU countries levy at the point of sale this year at rates of 17 per cent to 27 per cent. But many economists see VAT as trade-neutral since they apply to domestic goods and services as well as imported ones. Because national governments set the taxes through legislation, the EU has said they aren't on the table during trade negotiations. On the thorny issues of regulations, consumer standards and taxes, the EU and its member states cannot give much ground, Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Germany's Berenberg bank, said. They cannot change the way they run the EU's vast internal market according to U.S. demands, which are often rooted in a faulty understanding of how the EU works. What are potential impacts of higher tariffs? Economists and companies say higher tariffs will mean higher prices for US consumers on imported goods. Importers must decide how much of the extra tax costs to absorb through lower profits and how much to pass on to customers. Mercedes-Benz dealers in the US. have said they are holding the line on 2025 model year prices until further notice. The German automaker has a partial tariff shield because it makes 35 per cent of the Mercedes-Benz vehicles sold in the U.S. in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but the company said it expects prices to undergo significant increases in coming years. Simon Hunt, CEO of Italian wine and spirits producer Campari Group, told investment analysts that prices could increase for some products or stay the same depending what rival companies do. If competitors raise prices, the company might decide to hold its prices on Skyy vodka or Aperol aperitif to gain market share, Hunt said. Trump has argued that making it more difficult for foreign companies to sell in the US is a way to stimulate a revival of American manufacturing. Many companies have dismissed the idea or said it would take years to yield positive economic benefits. However, some corporations have proved willing to shift some production stateside. France-based luxury group LVMH, whose brands include Tiffany &Co, Luis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Moet & Chandon, could move some production to the United States, billionaire CEO Bernaud Arnault said at the company's annual meeting in April. Arnault, who attended Trump's inauguration, has urged Europe to reach a deal based on reciprocal concessions. If we end up with high tariffs, ... we will be forced to increase our US-based production to avoid tariffs, Arnault said. And if Europe fails to negotiate intelligently, that will be the consequence for many companies. ... It will be the fault of Brussels, if it comes to that. Many expect Trump to drop his most drastic demands Some forecasts indicate the US economy would be more at risk if the negotiations fail. Without a deal, the EU would lose 0.3per cent of its gross domestic product and US GDP would fall 0.7per cent, if Trump slaps imported goods from Europe with tariffs of 10per cent to 25per cent, according to a research review by Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels. Given the complexity of some of the issues, the two sides may arrive only at a framework deal before Wednesday's deadline. That would likely leave a 10per cent base tariff, as well as the auto, steel and aluminum tariffs in place until details of a formal trade agreement are ironed out. The most likely outcome of the trade talks is that the US will agree to deals in which it takes back its worst threats of retaliatory' tariffs well beyond 10per cent, Schmieding said. However, the road to get there could be rocky. The US offering exemptions for some goods might smooth the path to a deal. The EU could offer to ease some regulations that the White House views as trade barriers. While Trump might be able to sell such an outcome as a win' for him, the ultimate victims of his protectionism would, of course, be mostly the US consumers, Schmieding said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
