United States: DOE's advisory board proposes ways to combat AI data center power challenges

 The US Department of Energy's advisory board has proposed ways to combat the growing challenge of AI data center power use and its impact on the grid. The  board suggested building an AI data center for national labs, academia, and industry "to collaborate in development and assessment of algorithms for energy-efficient and/or energy-flexible AI training and inference." 
 

In the report, the board said that "the secretary should convene energy utilities, data center developers and operators, and other key stakeholders to start active dialog on how to address current electricity supply bottlenecks."The DOE is advised to work with other government agencies and the private sector to "develop a standard taxonomy and framework for defining and orchestrating grid services for large energy users that is adaptable to local and regional circumstances and priorities."

The report read: "The secretary should ask Congress to request routine collection of data that would allow quarterly tracking of trends in new data center commissioning and (to the extent possible) actual energy use for AI training and for AI inference, to refine models for more accurate projection of future AI energy needs and load shapes. DOE and the national labs should perform scenario analysis of data center power needs that address plausible scenarios of computation demands, compute efficiency, and algorithmic efficiency, including possible feedbacks where efficiency gains help drive greater computational demands."