Infrastructure · Trend

Virtual Power Plants for AI Data Center Energy

Google signed a deal with Voltus to use a virtual power plant on the US's largest grid to help power data centers, exploring demand-response mechanisms for AI compute energy needs.

Trend strength 3/10

Momentum +3/q

Confidence low

Status new

Forecast horizon

Connections

Connections · 1

How this node ties into the rest of the map, and the evidence behind each link.

to · informs 4/10

UAE Data Center Advantage for AI Infrastructure

Both trends address the energy and infrastructure constraints shaping where AI compute capacity is built globally.

+4 growth

Signal sources

Dated facts from primary sources in this direction.

Compute scaling 2024

Training compute for frontier AI models grew ~4–5× per year from 2010 to 2024 — a trend Epoch projects to continue toward 2030.

Epoch AI →

Data-center energy 2025

Global data-centre electricity use is projected to roughly double from ~485 TWh (2025) to ~950 TWh by 2030 — about 3% of world electricity.

International Energy Agency →

Inference cost collapse 2022–2024

The price to query a GPT-3.5-level model fell from $20.00 to $0.07 per million tokens between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024 — a 280× drop in ~18 months.

Stanford HAI — AI Index 2025 →

Open-weight frontier Jan 2025

DeepSeek disclosed its open-weight R1 reasoning model's final training run cost just $294,000; R1 was released under open weights on 20 Jan 2025.

Nature / DeepSeek →