The immense electricity needs of AI computing was flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet’s Google Cloud to plan for how to source energy and how to use it, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco on Monday, he pointed out that the company—a key enabler in the AI infrastructure landscape—has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.

“We also knew that the the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,” Kurian told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca. “So we designed our machines to be super efficient.”

The International Energy Agency has estimated that some AI-

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