Google Cloud CEO lays out 3-part strategy to meet AI’s energy demands after identifying it as the ‘most problematic thing’

The immense electricity needs of AI computing was flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet’s Google Cloud to plan for how to source energy and how to use it, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco on Monday, he pointed out that the company—a key enabler in the AI infrastructure landscape—has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.

“We also knew that the the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,” Kurian told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca. “So we designed our machines to be super efficient.”

The International Energy Agency has estimated that some AI-focused data centers consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and some of the largest facilities under construction could even use 20 times that amount.

At the same time, worldwide data center capacity will increase by 46% over the next two years, eq...