XWind: A Cross-site Router for Large Language Model Inference Serving at Renewable Energy Farms

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is driving unprecedented growth in electricity demand from data centers. Traditional power-system planning treats large computing facilities as inflexible peak loads, leading to costly infrastructure upgrades and long delays in grid interconnection. Recent work has shown that AI clusters can reduce electricity consumption during peak demand through software-based workload orchestration. This article explores how modern GPU-based AI data centers can operate as grid-interactive assets that respond dynamically to power system conditions. We describe an architecture integrating grid signals, workload scheduling, and power telemetry for fine-grained cluster power control. Experimental results from a real-world deployment on a 130 kW GPU cluster demonstrate multiple forms of flexibility, including rapid load reduction, sustained curtailment, and carbon-aware operation while preserving service levels for priority jobs. We further demonstrate performance-aware load shifting across geographically distributed clusters, enabling workloads to migrate toward regions with lower grid stress. Together, these capabilities transform AI infrastructure from static electricity consumers into flexible resources that support grid reliability, accelerate interconnection, and improve computing sustainability.

AI inference is becoming a persistent and geographically distributed source of electricity demand. Unlike many traditional electrical loads, inference workloads can sometimes be executed away from the user-facing service location, provided that latency, state locality, capacity, and regulatory constraints remain acceptable. This paper studies when such digital relocation of computation can be interpreted as latency-constrained relocation of electricity demand. We develop an energy-geography framework for geo-distributed AI inference. The framework models a three-layer architecture of clients, service nodes, and compute nodes, and formulates inference placement as a constrained optimization problem over electricity prices, marginal carbon intensity, power usage effectiveness, compute capacity, network latency, and migration frictions. The key object is the energy-latency frontier: the marginal cost and carbon benefit unlocked by relaxing inference latency budgets. The paper makes four contributions. First, it distinguishes physical electricity transmission from digital relocation of electricity-consuming computation. Second, it formulates a geo-distributed inference placement model with feasibility masks and migration frictions. Third, it introduces operational metrics, including relocatable inference demand, energy return on latency, carbon return on latency, and a relocation break-even condition. Fourth, it provides a transparent stylized simulation over representative global compute regions to show how heterogeneous latency tolerance separates workloads into local, regional, and energy-oriented execution layers. The results show that latency relaxation expands feasible geography, while migration frictions, egress costs, state locality, legal constraints, and capacity limits can sharply reduce realized benefits.

The rapid growth of LLM inference is shifting sustainability concerns from one-time training to continuous serving, where infrastructure decisions shape energy use, carbon emissions, water consumption, and service quality. Yet operators often need to compare deployment alternatives before large-scale infrastructure is built, making direct measurement costly, slow, and sometimes infeasible. We present InFactPlanner, a trace-driven decision-support framework for what-if analysis of sustainable AI data center deployment for LLM inference across single and geo-distributed sites. InFactPlanner combines query traces, hardware-model profiles, candidate site configurations, PUE/WUE parameters, renewable generation models, and time-varying grid carbon intensity to estimate power, energy, carbon emissions, water use, latency, and server utilization. The framework abstracts low-level serving effects into configurable hardware-model profiles, enabling rapid comparison of site selection, capacity placement, hardware, model, renewable integration, and routing choices. We validate the energy accounting pipeline by reproducing reference LLM inference energy estimates with less than 10% deviation, evaluate scalability across multiple data centers and server counts, and demonstrate scenario-driven decision analyses for hardware selection, renewable placement, geographic deployment, and carbon-aware routing. Our results show that sustainability-optimal choices can differ from latency-optimal ones, and that the carbon value of deployment depends strongly on the local grid mix.