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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK. They're mostly in planning stages.
The above isn't all to run AI, of course. Nobody was thinking about datacenters just for AI training in 2010. But to be clear, there are 94 nuclear power plants in the US, and a rule of thumb is that they produce 1GW each. So Google is taking up the equivalent of roughly one quarter of the entire US nuclear power industry, but doing it with solar/wind/geothermal that could be used to drop our fossil fuel dependence elsewhere.
How much of that is used to run AI isn't clear here, but we know it has to be a lot.
...and they won't be for at least 5-10 years. In the meantime they'll just use public infrastructure and then when their generation plans fall through they'll just keep doing that.