By Laila Kearney
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Google will fund the training of tens of thousands of new U.S. electricians, the company told Reuters on Wednesday, as Big Tech wades deeper into the country’s power industry on its hunt for the massive amounts of electricity needed for its AI expansion.
A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation.
The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.
Google’s funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States.
In another example, Microsoft announced last year that it would partner with Constellation to restart a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania – site of one of the country’s worst nuclear incidents – to feed its data centers.
Data centers could triple their power use in the U.S. over the next three years to make up 12% of the country’s electricity consumption, according to a Department of Energy-backed study.
To meet the demand, the country will need more power plants, transmission lines and the workforce to support them. The market for electricians is projected to grow 6% annually in the next seven years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association.
It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said.
“This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation,” said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.
Google, earlier this month, announced that it was partnering with the biggest regional U.S. electrical grid — operated by PJM Interconnection — to deploy artificial intelligence technologies aimed at getting new electricity supplies and power lines connected faster. It has struck the first corporate agreements to purchase energy from multiple small nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal energy for its data centers.
The company will also release a white paper on Wednesday on ways to speed up the expansion of the grid.
The white paper, which Reuters is first to report, includes policy recommendations to support new energy technologies like small modular reactors and advanced geothermal. Among those proposals is cost-overrun protections for advanced nuclear reactors through the Department of Energy Loan Program Office, accelerating permitting at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and bolstering a domestic nuclear fuel supply.
The paper also recommends Congress take action to expedite certain permitting for carbon capture, the build-out of transmission lines and to support technologies to increase efficiency on the existing grid.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
