Google’s new plan to keep its data centers from stressing the grid

AI data centers could flood the overtaxed U.S. power grid with demand and further drive up energy costs for consumers. Or, they could simply agree to use less electricity during the handful of hours per year when the grid is under the greatest stress, making it possible for tech companies to get the power they need without straining the system.

It sounds like an easy fix, but in reality it’s complicated to modulate the demand of a data center that can use as much power as a small city. That’s why it’s rarely done today. In fact, a Department of Energy report last year ​“identified no examples of grid-aware flexible operation at data centers” in the U.S., with one exception — Google.

Now, the tech giant is taking its flexibility efforts one step further and applying the concept to the machine learning operations that underpin its large language models, the technology driving the current boom in AI development.

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