Flagship: Sustainably Powering AI
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In 2025, Bits & Watts launched a new flagship program, Sustaining AI. This program focuses on monitoring and reducing AI’s greenhouse gas emissions, as well as using it to improve affordability, grid reliability, and grid interconnections.
Like the EV50 flagship program before it, Sustaining AI will support research that tackles a major grid challenge from many angles. By bringing together industry and academic experts to share their perspectives with each other, Bits & Watts aims to leverage the strengths of our community to anticipate the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence.
Six seed grants were selected to kick off this new program:
- An Analysis Framework for Data Center Microgrid Systems – Sara Achour
- Optimizing Energy Storage and Transmission for Data Center – Hunt Allcott
- A Power Supply to Remove Machine Learning, Transients from the Grid – Philip Levis, Juan Rivas-Davila, Ram Rajagopal
- Data and Models to Inform Optimal Siting and Flexible Operation of Data Centers to Minimize Costs, Carbon Intensity, and Cooling Water Impacts – Meagan S. Mauter
- Moving Away from Large Clusters: Grid-Aware AI Data Center Planning – Ram Rajagopal
- Integrating Socio-Psychological Perspectives in AI Model Selection for Performance and Sustainability – Khalid Osman, Tobias Gerstenberg