The new Alliance for Maximizing Power Efficiency in Data Centers is bringing industry leaders and top Grainger Illinois researchers together to solve problems at the nexus of computing and energy.
Life is about choices: Paper or plastic? Cash or credit? Chocolate or strawberry? Some choices are low stakes, while others have more serious ramifications. In some regions of the United States and beyond, increasingly difficult choices must be made about how to ration a limited supply of electricity between traditional consumers like homes, schools, hospitals, and agriculture, and increasingly power-hungry computing facilities.
Computing has had an immeasurable impact on society and is growing at an unrivaled speed, vastly outpacing the growth of the energy infrastructure that must sustain it. Most computers today are powered by the electrical grid, but the amount of electricity the grid can deliver is not increasing fast enough to continue meeting the increasing demand from computing.
“The average age of the power grid in North America is 40 years,” said Rakesh Kumar, a professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It was designed for the ‘old world’ of predictable, slow-varying loads, where we knew the exact number of customers and how many of them were turning on their fans or toasters. 40 years ago, there weren’t huge power swings in small amounts of time.”
The advent of AI has dramatically accelerated the growth of energy demands. Training an advanced AI model such as ChatGPT’s can consume enough energy to power tens of thousands of homes. Such models are based on scraping the entire Internet for any digital data that exists around the whole world, and staggering amounts of energy are needed to complete such a task over hundreds of thousands of machines.
Amid this increasing strain on the power supply, researchers and industry professionals worry that the availability of energy may start limiting the growth of computing in the “new world” of proliferating data centers. Data centers consume massive amounts of power, sometimes in excess of a gigawatt each. Because so much of this power gets dissipated as heat, additional power must be invested for cooling: nearly 40% of the power consumed by the computing industry is used for cooling alone. In addition, data centers generate significant energy, water, and noise stress for their surrounding communities. These factors all contribute to the huge and growing gap between supply and demand for energy.
“Computing and energy are colliding, and they’re colliding in ways that will affect how we do computing and in ways that will affect how we source energy, how much energy we source, and how it is regulated,” Kumar said.
To address this growing challenge, Kumar and colleagues from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have created the Computer Energy Nexus Initiative to focus on innovation, platforming and workforce development. This initiative will explore dynamic grid integration — seeking to make the grid more adaptable to today’s modern needs — and ways to make data centers more efficient, as well as efforts to build interactive tools that can guide data center construction decisions.
So far, the main result of this initiative is the Alliance for Maximizing Power Efficiency in Data Centers (AMPDC). Launched in fall 2025, AMPDC will facilitate collaborations between industry stakeholders and academic researchers on activities related to the computing-energy nexus, such as forecasting, interactive tools and models, and other innovations.
“We want to focus on innovation, because that’s what universities are good at,” Kumar said.
“We want to look at different research problems that exist at this computer-energy nexus, like how data center and energy grid interfaces should be designed. Our second challenge is materials: maybe we want to invent new materials with better thermal density that can store more power. Our third challenge is thermal management and waste recovery.”
By bringing together a set of stakeholders from the areas of energy generation, energy distribution, and transmission to define standards and interfaces and to build mutually beneficial databases, the Alliance hopes to bridge the gap between computer engineers with limited knowledge of power generation, and power experts with minimal computing experience.
“There’s a lot of opportunity here in training people to understand and solve the problems at this nexus,” Kumar said.
Addressing problems at the computing-energy nexus will require coordination among a large group of researchers across many engineering disciplines, a task for which the University is uniquely well-equipped.
“I believe that the future of the world will be intertwined with the future of computing,” Kumar said. “Access to energy may be one way to dominate these technologies and win the future. But without addressing these problems at the nexus of computing and energy, the progress of computing may halt or slow down, which may have a significant impact on the future prosperity of the planet and the world order. And I’m glad that Illinois is in the thick of it, trying to address these problems.”
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Rakesh Kumar is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of electrical and computing engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering.