Ayşe Coşkun publishes AI supercharges data center energy use – straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts in The Conversation
CISE Director and Professor Ayşe Coşkun (ECE, SE) published an article in The Conversation highlighting the energy strain that artificial intelligence has placed on the power grid. The article emphasizes magnitude of data center growth that has occurred in the advent of this era of large language models. In the United States, 15 states contain 80% of the countries data centers. In Virginia, where Data Center Alley is located, data centers consumer 25% of the state’s electricity. This has put a significant pressure on the state’s power grid. Across the country, communities are pushing back against new investments in data centers.
Coşkun‘s article explains that the solution to this problem could be flexible computing, the idea of having centers compute more when energy is cheaper, more available, and greener. The article notes that implementing this flexibility on a broad scale requires innovation in hardware, software, and grid-data center cooperation. The article also presents building more edge data centers as a possible solution to alleviate the strain on the power grid. This ideas involves building more smaller, distributed facilities.
Read Professor Coşkun‘s article in The Conversation here.
This article has been translated into Greek in the Liberal.
This article has been translated into Portugese in The Conversation here.