The Story You’re Not Hearing About AI Data Centers | Ayșe Coskun | TED

00:04Right now, the world is in an AI race. Companies, governments, universities are all racing to build bigger models, smarter systems. And behind the scenes, they are racing to build more data centers to power AI. But there's a problem. We are running head first into the limits of our infrastructure.

00:28The power grid includes all the infrastructure, power plants, transmission lines and all to generate and deliver power to our homes, our businesses, and now to AI data centers. In the United States, the grid operators are reporting that new AI data center projects are requesting power loads equal to entire cities.

00:50In some regions, utilities simply can't keep up. So when you hear “AI data center,” what comes to mind? For many, it's one thing: energy hogs. And they are not wrong. AI is dramatically accelerating the electricity demand of data centers. Just training GPT-4 is estimated to have consumed around the annual electricity use of thousands of US homes.

01:21In another striking example, in Ireland, nearly 20 percent of the nation's electricity is drawn by data centers today. And these are not just statistics. They are also community stories. In the data center alley in Virginia, residents recently saw higher electricity bills, 20 percent higher already compared to just a few years ago, as utilities scramble to serve massive new AI facilities.

01:53So energy-hog label seems well deserved. But that's only half the story. Here is the new view. These facilities are not just energy-hungry brains. They can also be the muscles of the grid, flexing on demand. Unlike our homes or hospitals, AI data centers run jobs that are predictable, controllable and often delayable.

02:24That makes them ideal to help balance supply and demand on the grid. By making AI data centers power-flexible, we can connect them much more rapidly to the grid, while at the same time making electricity more affordable and resilient. What's more, the AI boom is arriving just as the renewable boom is also taking off.

02:52Wind and solar don't follow our schedules, but data centers can. Which means we can align the rise of AI with the rise of clean energy, if we are bold enough to rethink their role. All this transformation to power flexibility didn't just come out of thin air.

03:15It builds on decades of research on energy-efficient computing, scheduling, optimization and many others. I've lived this journey myself. Early in my career, I asked a question that many found unrealistic. Could computer systems adapt their behavior depending on power grid needs, but without breaking their performance promise to their users?

03:49At the time, this sounded radical because why would we ever design a system that would slow itself down on purpose? But then came the breakthroughs. First, we discovered not all computing tasks are urgent. Some can wait for minutes or hours, and some can be slowed down without anyone really noticing it.

04:15For example, a researcher analyzing hundreds of medical images with AI may be OK with waiting just a little longer. Or, if you are fine-tuning your AI model over the course of the next few days, you may be OK with slowing it down for just a few hours.

04:35This inherent flexibility in computing gives us the flexibility we need to manage power. Second, we reframed the problem. Instead of asking how do we compute as fast as possible, we asked, how do we make computer systems meet the constraints of the power grid, while at the same time still delivering on user performance agreements?

05:02This shift led to new strategies: capping power, shifting workloads and provisioning the data center as a flexible reserve to the grid. A key aspect here is that we do keep the performance promise to users, so it's not arbitrary. User experience remains as a key target.

05:24And better yet, it becomes more predictable. So we built prototypes on real data-center servers, and they worked. Systems that could follow a power target while still delivering results. But all this journey wasn't smooth. There were paper rejections, funding rejections, colleagues telling me this would never work.

05:51Well, since I was a kid, I was told I'm a persistent person. Perhaps stubborn at times. And bold ideas require persistence because change almost always looks impossible before it looks obvious. So you take that feedback, you reframe it again and again, and you keep building.

06:15You keep proving. So what began as scribbles on a whiteboard 12 years ago, is now running on real AI data centers. Why does this matter now? Because the power grids challenge isn't just to generate more power. It's about timing. Solar gives us a glut of electricity at noon, but demand might peak in the evening.

06:41Wind might be abundant one day and scarce the next. Nuclear takes decades and billions of dollars to build and is often hard to locate in urban areas. Batteries are critical, but scaling them is costly, slow, and often not environmentally clean.

07:03Meanwhile, AI data centers themselves face five to seven-year wait times just to connect to the grid in places like Virginia. In AI time, where technologies shift in a major way every six months, five to seven years is an eternity. So here's the opportunity.

07:23With the right orchestration, AI data centers can be flexible today. No waiting, no new massive power infrastructure construction. They can soak up excess solar in the afternoon, scale down at peak times and act as virtual batteries today. And the stakes are real.

07:44Take Texas, August 23. During a brutal heat wave, the rising electricity demand pushed the grid to its limits. Wholesale electricity prices spiked over 800 percent in a single afternoon. So flexible loads, if they were widely available, could have reduced the costs and could have prevented the emergency alerts that went to the consumers.

08:12So we have two opportunities here. One, we can make current data centers flexible and help prevent blackouts and reduce electricity costs. Two, and perhaps the more significant, by making future data centers power-flexible, we can connect them much earlier without waiting for major power grid upgrades.

08:36If we ignore this opportunity, we are not just wasting renewable energy and we are not just raising our electricity bills. We are also slowing AI adoption, making it delayed, more expensive and less accessible to society. But there's a catch.

08:58Orchestrating this flexibility is not easy. Prices change hourly. Workloads may arrive unpredictably. Grid rules change across states, across countries. So no human operator and no single fixed data center management policy can keep up. This is where AI itself comes back into the story.

09:23The very technology driving this unforeseen demand is also probably the only thing smart enough to tame it. AI can learn patterns, anticipate grid needs and coordinate across data centers, across utilities, even nations in real time. Imagine a data center or a whole network of them, as an orchestra, with hundreds of instruments, all playing at once.

09:52Left on their own, it can sound like chaos. But bring in a conductor, suddenly all that noise turns into music. The conductor in this case is AI. AI can direct data center operation so that the data center can precisely match power constraints, depending on what the grid needs, what power is available and what users demand.

10:21The result is harmony. Reliable electricity, efficient computing and a system that works beautifully together. And that's exactly what we've built. We built software that slows down, speeds up, or pauses workloads in a data center, or shifts workload among data centers.

10:43Our conductor platform tunes performance and power at real time, all the while respecting user and cloud-provider performance needs. In this way, by flexing when needed, we can connect AI data centers much faster to the grid. Make better use of the available power in the power grid and enable faster AI adoption.

11:11I've been inside this story from an idea that once seemed impossible to prototypes in a lab, to systems now running in the field, and I believe this is just the beginning. AI is already reshaping how we compute, but it could also reshape how we power the world.

11:28So the question isn't how much energy AI consumes. The real question is how much flexibility, resilience and clean power can AI unlock? If we are bold enough to rethink AI data centers, the very machines that now seem like a burden could be our greatest assets in building a sustainable AI future.

11:54Thanks. (Applause)