From IEEE Spectrum, May 12:
The rise of electricity-guzzling data centers has forced the artificial intelligence industry to get creative about finding power. One of the latest ideas: Build micro data centers next to utility substations and operate them in concert, shifting the computation around based on power availability.
That’s the approach Nvidia and its collaborators are taking in a new pilot project they plan to build later this year. They’ll construct about 25 of these small data centers, each ranging from 5 to 20 megawatts, across five utilities in the United States. If one substation is overloaded with power demand, or if there’s an outage, the compute will be shifted to a different data center near a substation that has spare capacity.
To develop the fleet, Nvidia is partnering with data center builder InfraPartners, real estate service provider Prologis, and the nonprofit EPRI (formerly known as the Electric Power Research Institute).
The project aims to demonstrate a new way for data centers to be more flexible and accommodating of electricity availability. It’s also a way for data center developers to quickly secure power from the grid—an increasingly precious commodity, even in small chunks.
“We started looking at how much [unused] power is available at individual substations, and what we found was that on average, like 5 MW is nominally available…max 20 MW,” says Ben Sooter, director of Agentic AI Initiatives and Distributed AI Architecture at EPRI.
That’s too small to interest most data center operators, but building several at that size and operating them as if they’re one larger one is useful, Sooter says. Plus, shifting compute away from overburdened substations to those with more headroom can double the overall available power, he says.
“There are 55,000 substations in the U.S., and if they each have 5, 10, or 20 MW of spare capacity, that number adds up pretty fast,” adds Marc Spieler, senior director of energy at Nvidia.
Building energy flexibility into data centers
Squeezing every spare megawatt out of the grid will become increasingly important as data center construction continues to ramp up. In the United States, where half of all new data centers are being built, data centers could consume 9 to 17 percent of electricity generation by 2030. That’s more than double the current use, according to EPRI’s estimates. Facilities that train AI models are being built at the gigawatt scale, drawing about the same amount of power as a midsize U.S. city.As grid operators figure out how to accommodate such massive new loads, data center developers sometimes end up waiting up to a decade to get approved for a grid connection. In response, the developers are making incredibly bold decisions around power—moves that would have been unthinkable just two years ago.
Many are building their own gas power plants on site. Some are offering to pay for the cost of new transmission lines and other grid infrastructure. And a few are even investing in startup companies that are developing fusion and next-generation nuclear fission reactors, in the hope of meeting power needs a decade from now....
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