No wonder Google is desperate with more power: company data centers have more than doubled their electricity consumption in just four years.
The breathtaking statistic comes from Google’s latest durability report, which she published at the end of last week. In 2024, Google Data Centers used 30.8 million megawatt hours of electricity. This is up compared to 14.4 million megawattheures in 2020, the first year that Google broke out the consumption of data center.
Google is committed to using only carbon -free electricity sources to feed its operations, a task made more difficult by its frantic pace of growth center growth.
And the company’s electricity problems are almost entirely a data center problem. In 2024, data centers represented 95.8% of the electronic budget of the entire company.
The company’s ratio between the Cent-Cent-Else data center has been remarkably coherent in the past four years. Although 2020 is the first year that Google has rendered the electricity consumption figures of the available data center, it is possible to use this ratio to extrapolate over time. Some rapid mathematics reveal that Google’s data centers have probably used just over 4 million megawatt hours of electricity in 2014. It is an infiltrated growth in just a decade.
The technological company has already chosen most of the fruit with low maintenance by improving the effectiveness of its data centers. These efforts have borne fruit and the company is often greeted to be to the advantage. But while the efficiency of the company’s energy consumption (PUE) has approached the theoretical ideal of 1.0, progress has slowed down. Last year, sticking to the Google company scale fell to 1.09, an improvement of 0.01 compared to 2023 but only 0.02 a decade ago.
It is clear that Google needs more electricity, and to keep its carbon -free commitment, it has invested massively in a range of energy sources, including geothermal energy, both nuclear energy flavors and renewable energies.
Geothermal energy is promising for the operations of the data center. By explaining the heat of the earth, improved geothermal power plants can regularly produce electricity regardless of time. And many startups, including Fervo Energy with Google, allow you to drill profitable wells in more places.
On the nuclear merger side, Google announced last week that it would invest in Commonwealth merger systems and buy 200 megawatts of electricity from its next Arc power station, which should be published online in the early 2030s. In the world of nuclear fission, Google is committed to buying 500 megawatts of electricity from Kairos Power, modular.
Nuclear agreements have not yet provided power – and they will not do it for five years or more. Meanwhile, the company has made a renewable energy purchase frenzy. In May, the company bought 600 megawatts of solar capacity in South Carolina and, in January, it announced an agreement for 700 solar megawatts in Oklahoma. Google said that in 2024, he worked with the intersect power and the climate of the elevation of TPG to build several carbon -free electric power plants in Gigawatts, an investment of $ 20 billion.
Expenses are not surprising since solar and (to a lesser extent) the wind are the only two sources of power which are easily available before the end of the decade.
The new nuclear power plants take years to allow and build, and even the most optimistic deadlines do not see them connect to the network or to a data center before the end of the decade. Natural gas, of which the United States has a lot, is paralyzed by waiting lists of more than more turbines. This leaves renewable energies associated with storage of batteries.
Google has contracted with enough renewable energies to correspond to its total consumption, although these sources do not always deliver electrons when and where the company needs them.
“When we announced to the world that we achieved this 100%annual correspondence objective, we were very clear that it was not the final state,” said Google manager last week. “The final match was a carbon -free energy 24/7 24/7 wherever we operate at any time.”
Google has work to do.
Around the world, the company holds around 66% of its consumption of data center, paired per hour, powered by carbon -free electricity. But these average papers on certain regional challenges. While its Latin America data centers reached 92% last year, its Middle East and Africa facilities are only 5%.
These obstacles explain why Google is investing in carbon -free stable sources such as fission and merger, said Terrell. “So that we can finally achieve this goal, we will have to have these technologies,” he said.
