(Bloomberg) — Canada’s abundant hydroelectricity offers the best way to power booming artificial intelligence servers and win the global AI race — if the country is able to cooperate with the US amid a trade war with President Donald Trump, according to former Google chief Eric Schmidt.
“There’s a real limit in energy,” Schmidt told the TED conference in Vancouver on Friday, citing an estimate that the US industry will need 90 additional gigawatts to not throttle data centers.
“My answer, by the way, is: Think Canada. Nice people, full of hydroelectric power. But that’s apparently not the political mood right now — sorry,” he said, in a reference to Trump’s tariffs and claims that Canada has “nothing” the US needs.
He said a typical nuclear power plant produces about 1 gigawatt, and the construction of 90 plants in America isn’t happening. “How are we going to get all that power? This is a major major national issue.”
Politicians in Canada are aware of the tech giants’ demand for power and some have talked about serving it.
“We have about 250 data centers in Canada — we could do a hell of a lot more, and our secret sauce is our energy, our incredible supply of energy of all kinds: hydro, nuclear, natural gas, you name it,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said in a January interview. “So let’s unleash the production of these resources and bring all that money home.”
Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer and chairman, went on to describe the fears of how a race for AI dominance between superpowers could spark preemptive action and conflict.
Schmidt was co-author of a paper published last month introducing the concept of “Mutual Assured AI Malfunction” in which “any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals.” In the TED appearance, he described a viable outcome as bombing the opponent’s data centers.
“Do you think I’m insane? These conversations are occurring around nuclear opponents today in our world,” Schmidt said. “You can imagine a series of steps along the lines of what I’m talking about that could lead us to an horrific global outcome — that’s why we have to be paying attention.”
He referred to non-state or “track 2” dialog on the subject with China arranged by the late diplomat Henry Kissinger, one of his co-authors.
–With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary.
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