A new software startup backed by chipmaker Nvidia aims to solve a crucial problem as data centers proliferate: how to stop the power-hungry operations from crashing the grid.
Emerald AI, which officially launched Tuesday, orchestrates and coordinates artificial intelligence workloads in real time to avoid straining the grid in times of peak demand. By facilitating demand response among facilities that can sometimes use as much power as a small city, Emerald can turn data centers from threat to reliability into a grid resource, said CEO Varun Sivaram.
“I want AI data centers to become the most important reliability enhancing asset there is,” Sivaram said in an interview.
If data centers can be flexible during the handful of hours of peak demand that occur each year, Sivaram said, that will reduce the amount of new generation necessary to accommodate them. That, in turn, can help them connect to the grid faster and even help electricity rates from rising at their current rate.
