Google exec ‘calls out’ the No. 1 problem that American technology companies face and Chinese don’t have to
Google’s senior executive has now warned that the US electrical transmission system is now the single biggest challenge facing American technology companies. Creating years-long delays in connecting new data centers to the grid. As reported by Reuters, speaking at an American Enterprise Institute ever, Marsden Hanna, Google’s global head of sustainability and climate policy said the transmission barriers are slowing down the expansion of critical infrastructure.“Transmission barriers are the number one challenge we’re seeing on the grid,” Hanna said. “We had one utility who told us 12 years to study the interconnection timeline, which is sort of wild, but that’s what we’re seeing.” On the other hand, Chinese technology companies do not face such prolonged bottlenecks, giving them a competitive edge in scaling data center capacity.
How Google is tackling its ‘energy’ problems
To address these delays, Hanna urged policymakers to accelerate the approval process for new high-voltage transmission lines. Meanwhile, she also listed out Google’s strategy to power its data centres.Google calls it ‘co-location’ strategy wherein it plans to build data centres adjacent to existing power plants. By plugging directly into the source, Google can theoretically avoid the decade-long wait for a grid connection, bypassing the congested transmission system.“That’s the strategy we’re pursuing with colocation and our hope is that these can eventually be grid-connected resources,” Hanna said.The global electricity demand is said to increase by 30% by 2035 and it is largely driven by the rapid growth of data centers. Their share of total power consumption is expected to more than double, from 1.5% today to 3.5%, as artificial intelligence adoption accelerates.
Calls for US energy investment
Earlier this month, one of America’s biggest investor Michael Burry urged the US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to fast-track a $1 trillion nuclear power and grid expansion plan. In a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Burry argued that deploying small nuclear reactors nationwide and building a hardened national grid is the only way for the US to meet the increasing electricity demand which is driven by artificial intelligence. Burry also feels that this is only way in which we can hope to keep up with China, stressing that abundant energy is important for long-term national security and managing US debt.
