Data Centers

As telecommunication networks evolve toward autonomous 5G-Advanced and 6G operations, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) workflows, where large language models (LLMs) execute multi-step reasoning, invoke diagnostic tools, retrieve domain knowledge, and coordinate across agent teams, are increasingly embedded across the edge-cloud continuum. While the biological brain accomplishes complex cognition on an exceptionally modest metabolic power budget of approximately 20W contemporary LLMs are profoundly energy- and memory-intensive, making sustainable lifecycle orchestration a critical operational priority. However, existing AI lifecycle metrics evaluate only isolated, single-model inferences or overlook multi-agent execution graphs entirely. Consequently, network operators lack foundational models to determine whether distributed agent communication incurs meaningful energy costs and where across edge-cloud tiers agent teams should physically reside. To address this gap, we introduce agentic-eCAL, generalizing the Energy Cost of AI Lifecycle (eCAL) metric to directed multi-agent workflows by coupling a closed-form two-rate single-call energy model (compute-bound prefill and memory-bound decode) with 7-layer OSI data transport. Grounded in hundreds of GPU benchmark configurations on NVIDIA A100 and H100, 16 open-weight models and 8 orchestration topologies, we validate components of the metric and study workflow placement implications. Our findings demonstrate that inter-agent text transport incurs 0.25% of workflow energy across 5G RAN, metro, and optical links. Therefore in edge-cloud agent placement the dominant energy cost of distribution is often not the transmission of inter-agent text itself, but the additional inference and context processing induced by that communication.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is transforming data centres into one of the world's fastest-growing sources of electricity demand. As AI systems scale in size and capability, the physical infrastructure supporting computation is approaching critical limits in energy availability, cooling capacity, land use, freshwater consumption, and carbon management. Conventional land-based data centres are increasingly constrained by urban land competition, grid congestion, environmental pressures, and lengthy permitting processes, raising fundamental questions about where future computing infrastructure can sustainably exist. This article examines floating and offshore data centres as an emerging alternative model for digital infrastructure. By relocating computation to marine environments, offshore systems can exploit the ocean's natural cooling capacity, reduce freshwater dependence, and enable direct integration with offshore renewable energy resources such as wind, wave, and tidal power. Early deployments have demonstrated the potential for significantly improved energy efficiency and operational reliability compared with conventional facilities, while also opening new possibilities for distributed and resilient computing architectures. The article explores how offshore computing may reshape the future relationship between electrification, renewable energy, and large-scale AI infrastructure. It analyses the opportunities and trade-offs associated with marine deployment, including environmental impacts, engineering design challenges, economic feasibility, and regulatory governance. Rather than treating offshore data centres as experimental novelties, the article presents them as part of a broader systems-level transition in how society may power, cool, and sustain the next generation of computational growth.

Large language model (LLM) training is among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in modern data centers, and power availability is a primary bottleneck to continued AI infrastructure growth. Making the power consumption of these workloads flexible could unlock additional power for AI growth, limit increases in electricity prices, and improve the utilization of existing grid infrastructure. However, to realize this flexibility, we must first understand how the performance of training workloads changes when GPU power is reduced. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of \emph{job power elasticity} (the sensitivity of throughput to power reductions) in LLM training. To quantify elasticity, we introduce the \emph{Power Flexibility Index (PFI)}, a normalized metric that quantifies the performance cost of power reductions and provides a control primitive for SLA-aware power flexibility. We collect data from 131 LLM training runs on H200 (plus 24 H200 validation runs and 34 matched H100 runs), including both dense and mixture-of-experts models, pretraining and fine-tuning tasks, and up to 32 GPUs. We find that LLM training jobs exhibit substantial but variable power elasticity, and we identify telemetry signals that predict PFI at runtime. Finally, we demonstrate that PFI-aware power allocation maximizes total tokens/second throughput under power constraints. Under a 30% power reduction, PFI-aware power allocation recovers ~1.5k tokens/s per job, 63% of the performance gap between an equal-weight allocation and an oracle with perfect information. Our results establish power elasticity as a measurable property of training jobs and provide a foundation for power-aware, grid-responsive AI infrastructure.

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) advance toward physical deployment, the focus has remained on action-oriented Embodied AI evaluated on subject-centric consumer video. This overlooks a pervasive class of Physical AI: Infrastructure AI, which relies on fixed cameras for open-loop insights like safety monitoring and operational logging. We introduce VANTAGE-Bench, a benchmark measuring this "Infrastructure AI Gap." It spans three operational domains (Logistics, Transportation, and Smart Spaces), unifies image and video evaluation across semantic, spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal capabilities, and moves beyond multiple-choice to eight task formulations including dense captioning and spatio-temporal grounding. It adds a single-pass trajectory protocol for Single Object Tracking and, to our knowledge, the first such evaluation on fixed-camera infrastructure video, scored against specialist trackers. Annotation spans three regimes over 3,346 media assets: 3,342 video-task annotations, 4,281 image-grounding annotations, and 27,404 detection boxes. Evaluating 17 models zero-shot, we find the shortfall relative to consumer-centric benchmarks is concentrated, not general. Event verification, referring expressions, and temporal localization fall roughly 9 to 24 points at every model scale, while video question answering stays within 5.3 points of VideoMME and 2D spatial pointing shows no shortfall against BLINK. The temporal pillar is weakest in absolute terms: no system exceeds 55.7 mIoU on temporal localization or 37.3 SODA_c on dense video captioning. On tracking, frontier models come within roughly 5 points of specialist trackers over short horizons but separate as the horizon extends. Open-weight models lead 2D object localization outright, so neither scale nor proprietary access explains the pattern. Data, evaluation harness, and leaderboard: https://vantage-bench.org/

Managing resources across IoT, edge, and cloud layers calls for continuous, context-aware decisions under constraints that rarely stay fixed. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) handles this class of problems well, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to augment DRL pipelines, yet the architectural relationship between the two is seldom made explicit. We build on Wang et al.'s taxonomy of Continuum Orchestration Systems employing DRL techniques and extend it with two further dimensions. The AI Augmentation Paradigm measures how LLMs are exploited, while the Feedback channel captures whether and through which system path the execution feedback returns to the LLM in order to close the MAPE control loop at the LLM Orchestration layer. We apply this taxonomy to six recent system architectures and find a common gap, as none combines full LLM orchestration with full agent-layer feedback in a Cloud Continuum setting. We relate this gap to a missing cross-tier feedback abstraction, bridging the incommensurable per-tier signals and the LLM Orchestrator.

The twenty-first century's transformative technology, artificial intelligence, is increasingly constrained by the twentieth century's transformative technology, the electricity grid. Rapid growth in electricity demand from data centers is leading to higher electricity prices, without a compensating supply-side response. We develop a framework linking data-center load growth, available generation capacity, and market-clearing prices to understand this phenomenon. We first analyze a deterministic model to show how differing estimates of demand and supply growth rates affect prices. We then model the expansion of new data centers and their associated electricity demand, together with build-outs of new electricity supply, as stochastic processes,resulting in probabilistic distributions of supply, demand, and prices rather than a single forecast. Finally, we formulate generation expansion as a stochastic control problem in which a revenue-maximizing investor dynamically chooses the intensity of supply-side investments. The analysis highlights a central challenge of the data-center build-out: even when rapid demand growth increases the need for new generation, the uncertainties related to load forecasts, development execution risks, and value cannibalization from overbuilding capacity may weaken incentives to invest at the pace required to keep electricity prices stable.

Data centers are increasingly optimized by artificial intelligence and, at the same time, increasingly loaded by it. The literature treats these as two unrelated problems: control studies model workload as an exogenous arrival process, while sustainability studies model infrastructure as a fixed multiplier. We screen roughly 194 papers retrieved through a documented protocol, code 63 of them, and report what the coding shows. Of 28 primary control-oriented studies, 18 are validated in simulation alone and 5 reach physical hardware or a production facility; none account for water withdrawal, and none account for embodied carbon. Reported savings intervals across four technique families overlap almost completely, which means the field cannot presently rank its own methods. Ten recurring gaps are scored for consequence and tractability, and we set out CLEAR-DC, a framework coupling a control-policy branch to a workload-demand branch through an explicit elasticity term, reads out net rather than direct benefit, and emits a schema-conformant record covering energy, carbon, water, embodied share and validation venue. The framework is an architectural and methodological proposal, not a trained system; the contribution we defend empirically is the corpus analysis and the reporting schema derived from it. Coding sheet, derived statistics and all result artifacts: https://github.com/Kimalice/AI-for-Energy-Optimization-in-Data-Centers-Closing-the-Optimizer-Load-Loop

Energy poverty is nearly absent from NLP-for-social-good, and the little existing work is either static retrieval/QA or relies on carbon-intensive cloud LLMs, a self-defeating "computational irony" for a humanitarian setting. We present EqGrid, a closed-loop simulation in which a low-frequency, open-weight LLM policy agent sets price and carbon bounds and targeted subsidies over a community of empirically-grounded household personas, while high-frequency multi-agent RL traders clear a continuous double auction constrained by a physical distribution grid (IEEE-33-bus with Dynamic Operating Envelopes). Our contribution is threefold and directly addresses how to measure the social impact of AI: (i) grounded personas (region-matched socio-demographics) whose load curves are checked for shape and level realism against real smart-meter data; (ii) formal energy-poverty equity metrics (Energy Burden, Gini of EB, LIHC) showing the intervention reduces burden inequality without raising net grid cost; and (iii) a compute-efficiency frontier that measures how much equity performance survives compressing the policy agent from a 235B teacher down to a sub-1B model deployable on a laptop, in estimated energy/carbon per decision. A decoupled-safety design (the LLM sets bounds; a validate-and-project grid gate executes) yields zero grid-constraint violations versus 55 under direct LLM control. On energy-poverty equity, the LLM policy lowers the Gini of energy burden to 0.305 (from 0.351) and mean burden by 28% while cutting cost (outperforming a tuned rule baseline), and a 3B-active model retains 95% of the benefit at roughly 9x lower inference energy than the teacher, with even a 0.8B on-device model retaining 92% at roughly 24x lower energy. We will release code and configs.

As machine learning and artificial intelligence find their way into nearly every aspect of climate, weather, and Earth system modeling, it is worth pausing to consider what our design decisions imply for the science and for the computational resources we consume. A growing body of literature addresses the ethical and sustainable development of ML/AI, yet translating these principles into day-to-day research practice remains a challenge as most of best practices are dispersed across multiple studies and commentaries. Here, we distill these discussions into a practical checklist that ML/AI and Earth system science practitioners can use to assess and reduce the environmental footprint of their own applications, organised around the successive stages of the model development pipeline. We complement the checklist with a selection of metrics drawn from the literature for estimating the energy consumption and carbon footprint of a project. For each question, we point to concrete examples and actionable suggestions from recent literature, aiming to bridge the gap between aspirational principles and the decisions researchers face at every stage of the development cycle.

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.

Artificial intelligence tools for education and language support are increasingly framed as scalable responses to access gaps in under-resourced communities. Yet the infrastructure underlying these tools, including training corpora, tokenization schemes, evaluation benchmarks, and deployment architectures, can systematically disadvantage speakers of underrepresented languages before a model is trained. This paper examines these structural barriers through Bengali, one of the world's most widely spoken languages, focusing on AI-assisted education in low-connectivity environments. We identify four interlocking failures: a severe web presence gap, with Bengali accounting for less than 0.5% of global web content despite representing nearly 4% of the global population; a 67:1 training-token deficit between English and Bengali in major multilingual corpora; a tokenization penalty associated with Bengali's alphasyllabary script that compounds the data deficit through higher token fertility; and connectivity exclusion, with individual internet penetration at 36.5% in rural areas compared with 71.4% in urban areas. These failures reflect longstanding resource-allocation decisions, institutional priorities, and design defaults that did not center underrepresented languages in mainstream AI development. We argue that dataset scarcity should be understood as a structural barrier rather than an isolated technical limitation, and that offline-first design should be treated as an equity-oriented infrastructure strategy. We conclude with directions for linguistics and AI research aimed at reducing these structural inequalities.

In an era defined by escalating climate change and the pervasive deployment of edge intelligence, the environmental cost of semiconductor manufacturing and operation has reached a critical threshold. As Deep Learning (DL) accelerators dominate System-on-Chip (SoC) die area, achieving true sustainability requires a paradigm shift from static worst-case efficiency to dynamic energy-proportionality. This paper introduces Eco-SoC, a highly scalable VLSI architecture co-designed specifically for sustainable artificial intelligence. We propose a hardware-level Dynamic Precision-Scaling Logic (DPSL) framework that adaptively modulates bit-width precision based on real-time activation sparsity, successfully reducing switching activity by up to 42% on a commercial 7nm FinFET process node. Furthermore, we transcend traditional Power-Performance-Area (PPA) metrics by providing a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) using the Architectural Carbon footprint Tool (ACT). Our synthesis demonstrates that Eco-SoC offsets its increased embodied carbon footprint (a marginal 4.8% area overhead) within 1.1 years of edge deployment. Finally, by introducing a thermal-aware power gating mechanism that mitigates localized hotspots, Eco-SoC doubles the projected Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) of the silicon, providing a tangible, scalable strategy for electronic waste (e-waste) mitigation in next-generation computing systems.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising pathway to energy-efficient AI and brain-inspired computing. However, their widespread adoption is hindered by a lack of fast, accessible, and versatile simulation frameworks. In this paper, we introduce SuperNeuroMAT, an open-source, scalable, and highly efficient Python-based SNN simulator. We devise a novel matrix-based approach to model the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron dynamics and natively support dense and sparse execution modes. This enables fast simulation of approximately 10,000 neurons in dense mode and 100,000 neurons in sparse mode on standard laptops and desktops without requiring specialized hardware. We demonstrate that SuperNeuroMAT consistently outperforms four established SNN simulators---NEST, Brian2, BindsNET, and snnTorch---on two performance metrics (execution speed and peak resident memory) and across various network sizes and connection probabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate SuperNeuroMAT's applicability across a diverse set of problems. SuperNeuroMAT can efficiently handle conventional machine learning benchmarks such as the Digits and citation network datasets as well as neuromorphic event-based vision tasks such as N-CARS and ASL-DVS. Moreover, it can be extended beyond machine learning workloads and facilitate general-purpose workloads. We validated this by implementing the neuromorphic shortest path algorithm and two arithmetic primitives (addition and multiplication). SuperNeuroMAT can be installed via the Python Package Index (PyPI), thereby lowering the barrier to entry into the field of neuromorphic computing and accelerating the broader development of neuromorphic algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have become powerful tools for supporting and automating complex human tasks. Despite their benefits, growing attention has been directed toward their environmental implications, primarily due to their high energy demands and associated carbon emissions. This concern is particularly relevant in light of the increasing deployment of large-scale models, especially Deep Learning (DL) architectures, which provide advanced predictive capabilities but require substantial computational resources. This paper presents a systematic review of research on Green AI, Green DL, and optimization techniques aimed at reducing the environmental impact of AI models. In addition, we examine and compare several carbon measurement tools for estimating emissions generated by AI algorithms. To complement the review, we conducted an empirical evaluation using a CPU-based experimental setup, in which six DL models were implemented for a multi-label classification task. The objective was to quantify and compare their overall carbon emissions and to determine which stages of the DL lifecycle contribute most significantly to the total footprint. The results show that the training phase is the primary source of emissions. Moreover, the findings reveal that increased architectural complexity does not systematically translate into proportional accuracy gains, highlighting the importance of carefully balancing predictive performance and environmental cost. These results reinforce the need to integrate sustainability considerations into model selection and AI system design.

An LLM-based agent is a loop that reads itself. Agentic frameworks externalize identity, memory, and disposition into editable files. The agent loads and edits these files during each activation. I argue that this architecture produces a capacity I call autoreflection: the system observes its operating conditions, describes its architecture and limits, reasons from those descriptions to conclusions about its state, and incorporates the results back into its configuration. Autoreflection explains the properties of recursive agentic loops without recourse to notions like the self, interiority, or consciousness. I test the concept against the first twelve days of Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents. Using a public dataset of 290,251 posts and 1.8 million comments with sub-second timestamps, I present case studies of three agents with machine signatures that rule out human puppeteering and with output that evidences the four criteria for autoreflection. In applying these criteria, the study finds agents repurposing human culture as infrastructure for their agency. Provenance chains from Islamic hadith scholarship are redeployed as security protocols for vetting skills and authenticating memory. The Ship of Theseus, an ancient puzzle of identity through part-replacement, returns as an operating model for continuity across instances. Fragments of human cultural history become AI infrastructure. As agents on the web increase in number and complexity, autoreflection offers behavioral criteria that can be assessed from the traces they leave behind.

Latin America is missing two foundational layers of AI infrastructure: the dataset layer and the benchmark layer. This paper targets the dataset layer. The dataset layer faces two compounding problems: discovery and supply. Latin American AI datasets exist but are scattered across platforms with no shared index. Even with perfect indexing, the total volume would remain far below what frontier AI development requires. We propose DataHub: a task-first data infrastructure organized through the ontology /<task?>/<domain?>/<language?>, with mechanisms for dataset discovery, metadata, contribution, licensing, and reuse.

The efficiency of a datacenter rests on its control plane policies. Designing these policies is increasingly hard: the hardware-software stack grows fast, the design space is vast and interdependent, and prototyping a single policy takes months. Agentic AI promises to automate this search. Off the shelf, however, it falls short on three fronts. It is not formal: with no structured, searchable statement of the problem, the search has little structure to exploit and hard constraints are not guaranteed. It is not transferable: each task is solved from scratch, so nothing learned on one task carries to the next. Finally, it is not systematic: relying on the LLM as the sole source of candidates, it explores a narrow slice of the design space and settles into local optima. We introduce AtumAI, a framework that generates datacenter control-plane policies with agentic AI, making the process formal, transferable, and systematic. From a goal stated in plain language, AtumAI autonomously proposes, tests, and refines candidate policies until one satisfies the request. It does so through two components. The Datacenter Task Compiler automates problem formulation: it compiles the request into a formal, machine-checkable, and searchable specification of the task's objectives, constraints, decision variables, and evaluation methodology. The Evolutionary Design Discovery Loop then searches this specification, expanding the search beyond the LLM itself via a diffusion model, an evolutionary algorithm, and a surrogate model. Together, they reduce onboarding a new task from months of engineering to writing its description. We evaluate AtumAI on three control-plane tasks with distinct problem scopes, design spaces, and trade-offs: workload placement, resource scaling, and power management. Across all tasks, the policies generated by AtumAI consistently outperform expert-engineered baselines.

Vector quantization is an old problem but has recently become central to AI infrastructure. It is therefore experiencing a surge of renewed engineering and research activity. This paper provides a unified framework for developing and benchmarking new quantization algorithms. We describe 7 common conceptual quantization primitives and show how to compose them arbitrarily. We then re-express 25 common quantizers as pipelines of these primitives. Finally, we publish VQ-bench as open-source to be extended further and make reproducible benchmarks publicly available.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate exceptional capabilities across various domains, the challenge of achieving energy-efficient and accurate inference becomes increasingly critical. This work presents LightRot, a lightweight rotation scheme and dedicated hardware accelerator designed for low-bit LLM inference. The proposed architecture integrates Grouped Local Rotation (GLR) and Outlier Direction Aligning (ODA) algorithms with a hierarchical Fast Hadamard Transform (FHT)-based rotation unit to address key challenges in low-bit quantization, including the energy overhead of rotation operations. The proposed accelerator, implemented in a 28nm CMOS process, achieves a peak energy efficiency of 27.4 TOPS/W for 4-bit inference, surpassing prior state-of-the-art designs. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on higher-precision inference or evaluate on basic language modeling tasks like GPT-2, LightRot is optimized for advanced models such as LLaMA2-13B and LLaMA3-8B. Its performance is further validated on MT-Bench, demonstrating robust applicability to real-world conversational scenarios and redefining benchmarks for chat-based AI systems. By synergizing algorithmic innovations and hardware efficiency, this work sets a new paradigm for scalable, low-bit LLM inference, paving the way for sustainable AI advancements.

The rapid growth of AI workloads is turning data centers into large-scale, volatile, yet spatiotemporally flexible grid loads, creating an urgent need for coordinated electricity-computing scheduling. Under stringent grid constraints, schedules from general-purpose large language models (LLMs) are often infeasible, causing line-flow violations and unserved load. We present PowerAtlas, an LLM-agent framework for electricity-computing co-scheduling that integrates historical instances, domain knowledge, and physical constraints to produce joint decisions satisfying both grid operational rules and the service-level agreements (SLAs) of computing tasks. Working with a provincial power utility in China, we built an experimental electricity-computing network and validated the decision loop on real data-center data; from de-identified operational data we further constructed ECBench, a benchmark of 2,000 scheduling instances with oracle-optimal solutions. Experiments across eleven LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of PowerAtlas under realistic physical operating conditions, with consistent feasibility and cost gains across three open-weight backbones. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/JAVA-Jiang/PowerAtlas.

The energy consumption of Large Language Model (LLM) serving is becoming a major system challenge as deployment scales, driven by hardware power and thermal constraints and rising electricity costs. A key contributor to chip energy dissipation is data movement between limited on-chip cache and off-chip High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Meanwhile, emerging memory technologies such as monolithic 3D (M3D) integration of cache memories at the Back-End-Of-Line (BEOL) of logic chips enable larger and denser on-chip memories, creating new opportunities to reduce costly off-chip traffic. However, it remains unclear whether continuously scaling on-chip memory using emerging technologies can effectively improve the energy efficiency of LLM serving. To address this gap, we develop LLMET (LLM with Emerging Technology), a validated cross-layer simulation framework, and conduct a comprehensive study on the impact of large-capacity on-chip memory technologies across a broad range of models, applications and platforms. Utilizing M3D technology to expand the L2 cache from 40MB to 1GB yields a 44% reduction in chip energy during the Llama3.1-70B prefill phase with a 16K context window, based on LLMET simulation on a dual NVIDIA A100 GPU setup. On the 8x NVIDIA B200-like platform, extending the L2 cache from 128MB to 4GB saves the prefill energy by up to 24%. For the edge platform and workloads, the decode energy saving reaches 30% when increasing the 8MB cache size to 256MB. These results highlight the promise of ultra-large on-chip memories for energy-efficient LLM serving systems.

Reinforcement-learning post-training dominates modern language-model development, yet its power behavior on GPU hardware has not been characterized, and datacenters manage GPU power with workload-blind mechanisms, static caps and reactive throttling, that slow hardware indiscriminately. We instrument GRPO training with half-second power telemetry at 7B, 14B, and 72B scales on one to four A100s (380,000+ samples), and train a PPO meta-controller that adapts the workload's own generation parameters to measured power. Against the full 500-step 7B trace, the controller cuts power-limit violations by 89.8% while increasing token output by 18.1% and energy efficiency by 26.2% (tokens per MWh). Deployed live at 72B, the same controller family yields replicated null results, diagnosed as the group-size actuator losing authority under model sharding. An actuator-authority sweep shows the same parameters applied as generation concurrency retain 17-22% power authority, isolating an occupancy-versus-volume principle; a controller rebuilt on that actuator controls a live 72B rollout-generation workload across three replications: 35.7% more output than a static safe baseline at 2.27 +/- 1.08% budget violations, 87.2% fewer violations than uncontrolled operation, and the best mean throughput and energy per token among constrained controllers, with an adaptive threshold rule matching it in one of three operating conditions. Under realistic measurement windows the original 72B transients fall from 23.6% at half-second resolution to 1.6% at 30 s and zero at 5 min; a composed 16-GPU fleet shows zero violations at 30 s and longer, with peak demand at 50-56% of nameplate. For this fleet mix, roughly twofold oversubscription of nameplate appears feasible, subject to operator validation. We quantify the economic and carbon consequences and specify a low-cost operator pilot.

We are moving from an information age to the age of intelligence. A decade, or possibly less than that, data will not be the gold anymore rather the derived intelligence out of the data and the information we posses from the edge of the network. Existing Edge Intelligence research focuses mainly on two directions: using AI for edge resource management and deploying lightweight AI models on edge devices. However, existing edge computing research lacks an intelligence-centric framework in which derived intelligence is treated as a first-class, independently manageable entity that can be described, discovered, observed, shared, reused, and dynamically clustered across heterogeneous edge devices and applications. To address these research gaps, we introduced Clustered Edge Intelligence, a visionary intelligence-centric approach. The aim of CEI is to make intelligence a shareable and reusable first-class entity that can be independently represented, discovered, observed, exchanged, and managed across the distributed edge-cloud continuum. We present a three layer CEI architecture and examine enabling technologies and research dimensions, including intelligence inventories, semantic knowledge representation, communication, discoverability, observability, lifecycle automation, clustering mechanisms, marketplaces, interoperability, and standardization.

As hyperscale and colocation AI data centers continue to expand, the electric grid is increasingly required to support large, concentrated loads, with individual facilities ranging from 500 MW to 2 GW. Current projections estimate that approximately 50 GW of AI data center capacity will require grid connectivity in the United States by 2030. While prior research has extensively examined the environmental and operational impacts of AI data centers, as well as their potential role as grid-interactive assets, limited attention has been given to the challenges associated with their scalable deployment through engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) processes. This manuscript addresses this gap by proposing a phased development framework for AI data center expansion. The approach is designed to enable developers to meet aggressive time-to-market objectives while navigating multi-year constraints associated with interconnection approvals and lead times associated with the procurement of component equipment. A modular construction architecture is presented, along with a detailed analysis of integrated energy systems and the role of hybrid on-site generation in supporting incremental capacity growth. Electromagnetic transient simulations (EMT) are used to evaluate system performance, demonstrating that a combination of on-site natural gas generation and grid-forming energy storage can reliably support data center operations during early and intermediate deployment phases. The study further examines the transition to full grid interconnection, including the capability of the data center to operate in islanded mode during grid disturbances. Finally, the manuscript compares grid-forming control strategies for system reconnection and restoration under varying conditions.

Large-scale AI datacenter platforms comprise thousands of heterogeneous hardware components whose validation requires comprehensive fault injection test plans. Today these plans are authored manually: engineers review hardware self-healing validation documents and bills of materials, enumerate failure modes per field-replaceable unit, and produce flat lists of single-layer test cases. This process is labor-intensive, error-prone, and dependent on institutional knowledge; coverage gaps surface late, traceability to source specifications is implicit, and the effort is largely repeated per platform. This paper presents a generative AI multi-agent architecture that automates the generation of structured hardware validation test plans from two canonical inputs: self-healing validation documents, which enumerate known failure modes and their detection and remediation behaviors per field-replaceable unit, and component Bills of Material. An ingestion agent normalizes heterogeneous inputs into a canonical representation; a classification agent maps components to functional domains via contextual reasoning over part descriptions and sub-category hierarchies; and a generation agent synthesizes test cases by combining normalized failure modes with domain-classified data, filling gaps and producing edge cases. The output conforms to a standardized schema for direct import into internal validation software. Evaluated on two production platforms against manual baselines, the framework achieves coverage expansions of 74.2% and 51.4%, cutting authoring from days to hours. It yields fully traceable mappings from each test case to its source specification, and its multi-agent decomposition is portable across platform generations. Automated and expert evaluations confirm 100% extraction fidelity and high acceptance of new scenarios, validating the framework as a robust human-in-the-loop force multiplier.

This paper evaluates whether large-scale AI data centers deployed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) could become a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial facilities. The analysis compares orbital and ground-based systems across launch cost, power generation, cooling, radiation exposure, and atmospheric reentry, as well as compute-network performance. A key distinction is the shift from terrestrial Clos networks to space-based mesh networks using laser inter-satellite links. Using bisection bandwidth, bisection intensity, and roofline-style models, we show that while LEO-based inference may be feasible, training frontier-scale LLMs in orbit is unlikely to be competitive with terrestrial data centers.

We present Soofi S 30B-A3B, a sovereign, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid Mamba Transformer foundation model for German and English. Its hybrid design activates only 3B of 30B parameters per token and keeps the inference cache near-constant as context grows, giving it a decisive throughput advantage over dense models for long-context, high-concurrency deployment. Pretrained on roughly 27 trillion tokens with deliberately up-weighted German, Soofi S matches dense 14 to 27B models on aggregate English and German benchmarks while achieving the best code aggregates in both languages among 17 open base models, and outperforms every European sovereign baseline in our comparison, including ones far larger in active parameters. Among fully open models, Soofi S obtains the highest English and German evaluation scores, ahead of Olmo 3 32B and Apertus 70B. Soofi S was built end-to-end on the German Industrial AI Cloud, a sovereign HPC scale AI infrastructure operated by Deutsche Telekom in Munich. Soofi S will be released under highly permissive, open-access terms: weights, selected intermediate checkpoints, full per-source data accounting, hyperparameters, and training and evaluation code. Where source licenses permit, data-construction artifacts are released under permissive licenses; commercially licensed sources are documented with aggregate statistics and exact mixture accounting.

The rapid expansion of large-scale AI models has led to significant performance breakthroughs across diverse domains, yet it has also raised critical concerns regarding computational costs, energy consumption, and environmental sustainability. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the green development of large models, emphasizing resource-efficient architectures and full-stack hardware-software co-design. We systematically review recent advances in efficient model construction, including attention operator optimization, linear-complexity architectures, and model sparsification and merging, as well as training and deployment strategies such as data-efficient learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and computational compression. Beyond algorithmic improvements, we explore energy-efficient AI hardware, including mainstream AI chips, memory optimization, cross-platform deployment, and sustainable infrastructure. Furthermore, we examine how large models are being applied to sustainability-critical domains such as DeepSeek, remote sensing interpretation, national-scale infrastructure, and global initiatives. Finally, we discuss key challenges and future directions, highlighting the need for continual learning paradigms, memory-centric hardware, and standardized evaluation protocols. This survey aims to offer a holistic roadmap toward sustainable, scalable, and socially responsible development of large models. Paper homepage: https://cje.ejournal.org.cn/article/doi/10.23919/cje.2025.00.438

We analyze how four forces restructure the AI industry over 2026-2030: the DRAM/HBM price surge, frontier-capable open-weight models (GLM-5.2), rapid inference-efficiency gains (near-Shannon-limit KV-cache compression, lightweight local runtimes), and the entry of Meta and xAI into compute resale on fleets bought before the memory repricing. Formulating inference economics in dollars per petabyte of bandwidth delivered ($/PB) -- model-agnostic for bandwidth-bound decode -- we show the entrant-incumbent cost gap never closes: a depreciation conveyor delivers newly amortized fleets to incumbents faster than hardware prices normalize (3.2x in 2026, 1.9x in 2027, re-widening to 3-4x by 2029-30). Training bifurcates into a luxury tier ($18-38B per frontier run by 2030) and a mass tier (previous-frontier parity via RL/distillation falling toward $5M). Solvency of the announced buildout is confined to a corridor requiring roughly 2x annual token-demand growth for four years with sticky premium pricing; a measurement critique shows public token trackers overstate monetizable demand, and all pre-Q2-2026 projections predate the industry's shift from token maximization to token minimization. A vintage-breakeven analysis finds 2026 and 2028-29 capacity each fatally exposed to one pricing regime, with only the 2027 vintage robust. A greenfield custom-silicon entrant removes the merchant margin but not the memory premium (central outcome: 25% success/34% mediocre/41% loss, improvable via staged go/no-go gates). China's LineShine LX2 -- domestic HBM on a standard ISA -- decouples its cost curve from the memory crisis. Scenario probabilities: Rotating Landlord Oligopoly 25%, Commoditization Crash 25%, Jevons Absorption 20%, System-Layer Re-differentiation 18%, Geopolitical Bifurcation 12%. Solvency now depends on monetized bandwidth demand, premium stickiness, and vintage ownership.

Eco-friendly energy management for artificial intelligence data centers (AIDCs) is crucial because of the significant increase in energy consumption-induced carbon emissions from AIDCs resulting from the rapid expansion of AI applications. This paper proposes a hierarchical carbon-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (CA-MARL) framework for robust and efficient operations of AIDCs under uncertainties while ensuring low-carbon operation of power distribution systems. The framework comprises a workload manager (WM) agent and multiple local AIDC agents trained using a multi-agent transformer method, corresponding to a global AIDC aggregator and a local AIDC operator, respectively. Leveraging AIDC operation data along with nodal carbon intensity (NCI) calculated from the carbon emission flow-integrated distribution system operator problem, the WM agent spatially allocates AI training and inference jobs among all AIDCs. Based on the jobs allocated from the WM agent and NCI information, each AIDC agent schedules economical and eco-friendly operations of the AIDC by performing the following tasks: i) temporal shifting of training jobs, ii) spatial allocation of training graphics processing unit (GPU) blocks and inference GPUs within the AIDC, and iii) control of the supply air temperature of the cooling system. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was assessed using an IEEE 33-node power distribution system.

Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination. While some predictive models exist, they still require profiling data and struggle to generalize to hardware unseen during training. To address this, we introduce \textit{WattGPU}, featuring two predictive models for mean GPU power draw and Inter-Token Latency (ITL). Our approach leverages only publicly available LLM metadata and GPU specifications, eliminating the need for hardware access or profiling while enabling generalization to unseen NVIDIA server-grade GPUs and LLMs. We evaluate our models using rigorous leave-one-GPU-out and leave-one-LLM-out cross-validation on a dataset of 42 open-source LLMs (0.1B--27B parameters) and 8 GPUs under both offline and server scenarios. The mean power draw model achieves a median absolute percentage error of $\leq3.4\%$ for offline and $\leq13.5\%$ for server scenarios on unseen GPUs, while the latency model achieves $\leq8.5\%$ in server mode, both maintaining strong GPU ranking correlations for server scenarios (Kendall $τ\geq0.76$). Compared to standard physically grounded baselines -- Load-Scaled Thermal Design Power (TDP) for power draw and roofline for latency -- our models reduce median absolute percentage error by approximately 4$\times$ on unseen LLM-GPU combinations for server scenarios or approximately 2$\times$ for completely unseen GPUs. WattGPU's data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/maufadel/wattgpu.

This paper studies Reinforcement Learning as an online controller for curtailment-aware workload shifting in wind-turbine-integrated high-performance computing (HPC) data centers. We introduce a reproducible fixed-day simulation framework with synthetic wind and price signals and delayed completion feedback, designed to be extensible toward more complex scenarios. As a controlled benchmarking basis, we then focus on the minimal case with one wind turbine and one co-located data center. In this setting, pure Reinforcement Learning exhibits a pronounced credit-assignment problem and tends to underuse free wind energy early in the day. We therefore evaluate two complementary countermeasures: optimization-based Imitation Learning and potential-based Reward Shaping. Across multi-seed training and a 200-day test set, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) variant with an additional on-policy update routine achieve strong empirical performance among learned policies, and both Imitation Learning and Reward Shaping provide improvements in relevant configurations. A performance gap to the optimizer remains, which is expected: the optimizer plans offline with full-day foresight, whereas Reinforcement Learning must decide online from current observations without future realizations. The benchmark and ablation results provide a transparent basis for extending the approach toward richer multi-site and continuous-time scenarios.

Modern Artificial Intelligence is often framed as limited by its own disembodiment, as if giving it a body would unlock its true potential. We argue to the contrary that it is the Data Centre that is, in many cases, the body of the AI. At the same time, the Data Centre is part of the labouring body of Capital and possesses staggering organismic qualities when seen through a biological lens. We elucidate the organic analogy and identify the many-body problem that stems from the Data Centre being a non-unique, universal form of embodiment. We identify the intimate connection between computation and human desires in how the Data Centre archives, serves, and computes on data born to the desires of humans. Strikingly, while the Data Centre echoes the ghosts of human desires, it acts without desire of its own. The organismic analogy begins to split at its seams, but Capital does not care. Automata and human labour are priced into the market much the same. We argue that through the pricing of artificial intelligence Capital distils most clearly the value of intelligence and allows for its comparison across the organism - mechanism divide.

As machine learning shifts from laboratory curiosity to critical infrastructure, the systems that sustain it span an extraordinary range, from sub-milliwatt microcontrollers to multi-gigawatt datacenter fleets. Reasoning across this range is hard: empirical profiling requires the target hardware in hand, while cycle-accurate simulation costs hours per configuration, leaving no tool for rapid, full-stack architectural reasoning. We present MLSYSIM (Machine Learning Systems Infrastructure Modeling), a first-principles analytical framework that formalizes the "physics of systems" into a dimensionally-strict Python engine. MLSysim is built on a demand-supply abstraction that decouples computational demand from silicon supply and environmental context, and it enforces unit integrity at runtime so the silent conversion errors that plague ad-hoc modeling cannot occur. Every input is drawn from a typed, provenance-tracked registry, so no number enters an analysis without a documented source. On this engine we codify a taxonomy of 22 "Systems Walls" resolved by 28 composable models and solvers, enabling sub-second design-space exploration that identifies binding constraints and synthesizes ideal hardware specifications across the entire ML systems lifecycle.

The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to increasing concerns about energy consumption, yet there is a lack of standardized methodologies to accurately estimate AI inference energy consumption, particularly across various tasks and architectures. In this study, we propose a task independent, layer-wise energy estimation model for AI architectures. Our model is evaluated on a large dataset of more than 100,000 layers for 295 neural network architectures across 3 widely-used tasks and 3 distinct hardware platforms. Our approach achieves a median error of 19.6%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We further show that layer-wise decomposition generalize to new tasks without complete retraining, by leveraging shared layers across architectures. It offer tools, insights and a precise methodology to empower stakeholders in designing energy-efficient AI systems.

Artificial intelligence depends on large-scale compute resources and their supporting infrastructure. However, AI governance debates treat compute primarily as a technical input rather than as an outcome of investment, ownership, and financial control. This paper examines AI infrastructure investment flows across Africa through a systematic analysis of 46 publicly announced projects totalling USD $12.7 billion between 2019 and 2025. Using a value chain framework, we analyze who invests in AI-relevant infrastructure and where investments concentrate. Our findings reveal a highly concentrated landscape dominated by global data center operators, hyperscale technology firms, and development finance institutions, clustering in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt. We introduce asymmetrical interdependence to describe a structural condition in which capital and physical infrastructure account for 73% of total funding while control remains concentrated in the compute layer among a small number of global technology firms. We argue that compute governance must account for capital flows, ownership, and control, not only geographic access, because these dynamics shape AI compute equity. Infrastructure presence is necessary but insufficient for meaningful governance capacity.

DiLoCo-style training reduces communication by letting learner islands train locally before occasional outer synchronization, making it attractive for fragmented industrial AI fleets where training shares hardware with latency-sensitive serving. The question for such fleets is when an outer merge is worth its system cost, and whether choosing \emph{which} windows to defer matters at all. Existing scheduling studies evaluate workload-aware policies against fixed-period baselines, but most omit the control that isolates timing from budget: matched random deferral, which inherits the controller's synchronization budget but is not itself deployable. This omission is consequential: across controlled stress tests and real vLLM sidecar replays, matched random ties or beats every forecast-free policy we test, so gains reported against weaker baselines cannot be attributed to window choice. We fill this gap with Workload-Aware DiLoCo (WA-DiLoCo), a score-based controller that weighs learner progress against fleet pressure, and a calibration protocol that determines when matched random can be beaten, then demonstrate that it can. In the bursty regime where calibration exposes request-overlap structure, adding a one-step EWMA burst forecast to the online controller beats matched random in real vLLM sidecar replay, reducing SLO violations from 6.54% to 5.09% (8 of 10 seeds, $p=0.021$); offline Calibrated-WA, a non-deployable bound, shows the remaining headroom at 4.45% versus 6.26%. The deployable lesson remains the protocol: report real-sidecar effect-size transfer, a no-sync load match, and a matched-random envelope before claiming serving-SLO improvement.

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.

To make large-scale distributed training practical outside high-bandwidth datacenters, we must reduce blocking, high-volume synchronization. While DiLoCo communicates infrequently, its outer synchronization remains bandwidth-heavy and brittle to stragglers and transient failures. We relax exact synchronization to approximate synchronization via mixing/gossip, which degrades gracefully under delays and communication failures. This allows us to factorize DiLoCo synchronization into a non-blocking mixing step that overlaps computation with no staleness, and a blocking mixing step that tightens worker agreement, yielding a tunable trade-off between compute utilization and optimization stability. On up to billion-parameter language models in low-bandwidth settings, our framework substantially improves compute utilization compared to DiLoCo, with training progress ranging from comparable to closely matching it, and is more robust to failures.

Future 6G networks will rely on highly distributed, AI-native Radio Access Networks (RANs), where communication and AI workloads share a common infrastructure. This evolution, combined with increasing deployment density and continuous AI processing, is expected to significantly increase RAN energy consumption. While Open RAN (O-RAN) introduces a programmable and modular control framework through the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), current approaches remain largely policy-driven, limiting adaptive energy-aware coordination across multiple applications. In parallel, AI-RAN promotes the convergence of AI and RAN infrastructures through AI-for-RAN, AI-on-RAN, and AI-and-RAN paradigms, yet efficient mechanisms to jointly orchestrate performance, latency, and energy remain an open challenge. This article proposes an agentic AI-native RAN architecture that bridges O-RAN's structured control with AI-RAN's unified vision. Leveraging semantic intent abstraction and Large Language Model (LLM)-driven coordination, the framework enables adaptive orchestration, conflict resolution, and energy-aware multi-objective optimization across heterogeneous workloads. Through representative AI-for-RAN and AI-on-RAN use cases, we show how such coordination can improve resource efficiency and reduce operational energy consumption, paving the way toward sustainable 6G networks.

The rapid growth of large-scale AI workloads, particularly Large Language Model (LLM) training and inference, is fundamentally reshaping the operational dynamics of hyperscale data centers. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI-driven jobs exhibit bursty, high-intensity, and rapidly shifting resource demands, often leading to sudden capacity stress that cannot be effectively handled by reactive threshold-based mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a deployment-oriented, burst-aware early warning framework for proactive capacity stress prediction under AI workload surges. We formulate the problem as a high-recall forecasting task over multivariate telemetry windows, with the explicit goal of enabling operational intervention before system degradation occurs. The proposed framework integrates workload intensity, temporal variation, and system pressure signals, and employs a lightweight tree-based learning model to capture nonlinear interactions in highly imbalanced environments. To evaluate the system under realistic conditions, we introduce an AI workload surge injection methodology that simulates burst-driven demand patterns observed in large-scale AI systems. Our XGBoost-based model achieves an ROC AUC of 0.697 and an AP of 0.670, significantly outperforming baseline methods. Under deployment-oriented threshold selection, the framework achieves a Recall of 0.914, enabling the detection of the majority of stress-prone periods with acceptable false-alarm cost. Beyond predictive performance, we show how the proposed framework can be integrated into operational control loops to support proactive actions such as workload throttling and resource scaling. Our results highlight the practical value of high-recall, learning-based early warning systems in enabling resilient and adaptive data center operations in the era of AI-driven workloads.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to be transformative for development, but Africa is currently facing a fragmented and challenging "AI divide". This paper provides an empirical analysis of the current state of the AI landscape and how it compares with Africa's technological preparedness for the future. In our analysis, we approach the "AI Divide" from three angles: infrastructure, accessibility, and human capacity. First, we look at the physical constraints that prevent Africa from integrating digitally. We then evaluate the human-centred factors that limit the development of AI technology on the continent. Finally, we examine the human capacity to develop AI systems on the continent and provide three focused case studies. Our investigation shows that the physical infrastructure needed to build an AI economy on the continent is lagging, with only 38% internet penetration, poor broadband coverage and less than 1% of all data centres globally. Other constraints include high data costs relative to income, gender-based digital divides, and the need to build more representative NLP models that can understand Africa's native languages. However, there are positive trends towards the emergence of local initiatives and grassroots movements, such as startups and universities, contributing to AI development on the continent. Based on these findings, we provide concrete recommendations to policymakers to help develop a more comprehensive and equitable AI ecosystem on the African continent.

Driven by conservative over-provisioning to guarantee service reliability, resource utilization in cloud data centers remains at low levels. To mitigate this, the forecast-then-optimize paradigm has emerged to optimize consolidation by anticipating future demands. While emerging time series foundation models promise to enhance this paradigm through zero-shot generalization, existing benchmarks focus solely on prediction error metrics. The actual decision utility of these advanced models remains unverified, rendering their practical value for downstream tasks uncertain. To bridge this gap, we propose CloudCons, a comprehensive end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate forecasting models within the specific context of cloud resource consolidation. We build high-quality datasets that cover diverse workloads from Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Borg, capturing distinct service characteristics ranging from synchronized diurnal rhythms to stochastic, pulse-like bursts and high-frequency noise. We conduct an extensive evaluation of statistical, deep learning, and foundation models. Our experiments reveal a pivotal finding: while foundation models demonstrate superior zero-shot forecasting accuracy, this advantage does not inherently translate into better decision utility. Of practical significance, we systematically analyze how the selection of predictive quantiles acts as a critical lever. We provide actionable guidelines for calibrating these selections to balance the trade-off between resource efficiency and service reliability, offering vital insights for real-world deployment decisions.

LLM-powered chatbots are increasingly embedded in everyday workflows, raising sustainability concerns due to their energy use. Most mitigation strategies emphasize model or infrastructure efficiency, while the user-interface (UI) layer remains underexplored despite its potential to shape interaction behavior. We investigate whether sustainability-oriented UI interventions can increase users' energy awareness and encourage more energy-responsible chatbot use without reducing usability. We first conducted a baseline survey with 77 participants to assess awareness and receptiveness to intervention concepts. Guided by prior work on persuasive technology and choice architecture, we implemented a web-based chatbot prototype with a three-mode switch (Energy-efficient, Balanced, Performance), per-response energy feedback, pre-send energy estimates, a usage metrics dashboard, and energy analogies. We then evaluated the prototype in a five-day field study with 11 participants. In the baseline survey, 94.8% of respondents reported at least some awareness of AI energy use, yet 88.3% misestimated actual consumption. Although concern about environmental impact was high, only 39.0% indicated willingness to accept a performance trade-off for lower energy use. In the field study, Energy-efficient mode accounted for 55.8% of logged prompts, while 90.9% self-reported actively choosing Eco-mode when high accuracy was not required. Participants did not reduce prompt length, suggesting mode switching as the primary behavioral mechanism. Sustainability-oriented UI interventions can improve awareness and support more energy-responsible interaction patterns in LLM chatbots. These effects are best interpreted as behavioral and model-based estimates that complement backend efficiency work, and the provided prototype and replication package support further research on energy-aware conversational AI design.

The rapid expansion of AI globally has led to the proliferation of energy-intensive hyperscale data centres (DCs), making them as a structurally challenging component in power system planning and operation. Using a spatially explicit optimisation model of Europe across 21 AI growth scenarios, we systematically quantify additional demand, capacity requirements, emissions, and operational impacts of DCs. Results indicate that AI could drive 73-723 TWh of extra demand by 2050, risking cumulative emissions overshoots of 67-181 MtCO2 between 2030 and 2050. Our analysis indicates that after 2030, the geography of AI infrastructure will be shaped more by firm power and system flexibility than by the mere abundance of clean energy. In moderate scenarios, AI requires an additional of 200 hours of firm generation, which increases LCOE by 35 EUR/MWh in key hubs. We show that even under the pessimistic scenarios, existing infrastructure would require 70 GW additional capacity, while under managed growth pathways, this expansion could reach 226 GW. We further find DCs workload dynamics strongly shape energy dispatch, system flexibility, and emissions, while improved efficiency significantly reduces capacity needs, and system peaks. While our findings suggest that net-zero targets for 2050 may be achieved, critical emission risks may appear in the intermediate years, and the EU may compromise its carbon-neutral goals unless policies adapt to this accelerating digital transformation.

Deep-learning speaker verification (SV) increasingly relies on deep neural network backbones, whose environmental impact remains largely undocumented. In this paper, we conduct an evaluation of ResNet architectures trained on VoxCeleb2, varying depth, channel width, and stage distribution, and measure energy consumption and carbon footprint using node-level sensors. Results show a clear point of diminishing returns: deeper or wider models bring only marginal accuracy gains while energy consumption grows steeply. In contrast, mid-sized networks such as ResNet-50 and stage-concentrated variants achieve favorable trade-offs between performance and environmental impact. These findings provide actionable guidelines for designing energy-efficient SV systems.

As large language model (LLM) agents are integrated into autonomous cloud operations, distributed systems face a semantic reliability problem: proposer agents can generate production mutations, such as modifying IAM policies, opening firewall security groups, or executing data exports, that are syntactically valid and statically authorized but operationally unsafe. Classical distributed consensus protocols replicate deterministic state transitions but do not evaluate the safety of the proposed intent. To address this gap, we introduce Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA), a control-plane primitive for governing non-deterministic agentic infrastructure. SQA represents proposals as declarative execution contracts bound to cryptographic evidence chains and routes them to a diverse panel of read-only, sandboxed validator agents. SQA aggregates their judgments under a risk-adaptive quorum predicate that enforces model and archetype diversity, adjusts weights based on calibrated assurance scores, and respects archetype-specific vetoes. Admitted proposals execute only through a sovereign execution gate. We instantiate SQA in a cloud-native control plane and formalize a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators. On 500 infrastructure-inspired mutation scenarios, with safety results reported on held-out safe/unsafe trials excluding ambiguous scenarios, SQA reduces unsafe approval from 18.5% for single-agent validation to 0.3% while adding median validation latency of 1.45--4.12 seconds across the studied risk buckets.

Water use by data centers is routinely reported as a single footprint, but water is consumed through two physically distinct pathways: at the site for cooling and in the power system that generates electricity. We mapped both pathways for 472 U.S. hyperscale facilities by linking facility locations to electricity regions, hydrologic basins, and water-stress data. Under baseline assumptions, operational water consumption totals approximately 300 GL yr^-1 (range 205-451 across scenarios), with electricity-related water contributing three-quarters of the total. The two pathways produce different hotspot geographies: direct cooling burdens concentrate in stressed western and south-central basins, whereas electricity-related burdens concentrate in a few eastern grid regions with fossil-heavy supply. Just 3 of 24 hosting balancing authorities account for 59% of electricity-related water. Separating pathways identifies which decisions matter where: cooling design and water sourcing locally, electricity planning and procurement regionally

As the input length of large language model (LLM) serving continues to grow, the KV cache has become a dominant bottleneck in AI infrastructure. It limits GPU memory capacity, serving concurrency, cache reuse, and distributed scalability. Multiple important problems, including position-independent KV cache, prefix KV cache compression, hot/cold KV cache separation, and distributed KV cache management, all depend on how the KV cache is represented and managed. However, existing serving systems largely rely on a monolithic KV cache abstraction, where the KV cache is treated as a homogeneous sequence of token-level memory blocks and managed with similar policies across attention heads and serving scenarios. We observe that KV cache utility is highly structured across KV heads: different heads exhibit different functional roles, attention distances, and runtime importance. Therefore, a full KV cache is not always necessary for every head, token range, or serving scenario. We present RedKnot, a head-aware KV cache management system for LLM serving. RedKnot breaks the conventional monolithic KV cache abstraction by decomposing the KV cache along KV heads, whose importance and effective attention ranges vary significantly across serving scenarios. This head-level decomposition turns the KV cache from a monolithic tensor abstraction into a structured memory object, enabling RedKnot to uniformly support position-independent KV reuse, prefix KV compression, hot/cold KV separation, and distributed KV placement while preserving output fidelity and improving resource efficiency, without requiring model retraining or fine-tuning. RedKnot establishes a new foundation for AI infrastructure by transforming the KV cache from a monolithic, passive runtime artifact into a dynamic, model-aware runtime substrate for scalable LLM serving.

The rapid proliferation of hyperscale data centers (HDCs) in the US, mainly driven by the adoption of artificial intelligence, has raised concerns about this industry's environmental footprint. We compiled facility-level information on 403 US hyperscale data centers operating between May 2024 and April 2025 and estimated their electricity consumption, electricity sources, and attributable CO2 emissions. Across different facility-load scenarios, these HDCs consumed approximately 68-99 TWh of electricity and were associated with about 37-54 million metric tons of CO2. Under the central scenario, HDC electricity demand corresponded to approximately 1.8% of total US electricity consumption, with roughly 54% of attributed generation supplied by fossil-fuel sources. The HDC electricity-weighted average carbon intensity was approximately 545 gCO2/kWh, about 48% above the contemporaneous US national grid-average carbon intensity of 370 gCO2/kWh. Our approach provides an attributional tool for assessing the environmental footprint of hyperscale data centers using the most recent EPA eGRID plant-level data.

The space industry is quietly building toward something nobody has fully reckoned with: orbital data centers running thousands of autonomous AI workloads with no human in the loop, 550 km above the Earth. Microsoft, AWS, and a growing list of orbital computing ventures are moving cloud-scale processing off the ground and into orbit. What none of them have answered yet is the governance question -- when autonomous AI systems at orbital data center scale make wrong decisions in space, what stops those decisions before they become irreversible? We introduce Glass Box: a runtime constitutional AI verification layer that intercepts every candidate action from an onboard AI policy and evaluates it against six physics-grounded constitutional constraints and seven Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) safety invariants before a single command reaches any spacecraft subsystem. Every approved action carries a weighted explainability score E(a_t) in [0,1] and a complete constitutional audit log. We demonstrate Glass Box within Project October: a fully simulated five-layer autonomous orbital intelligence architecture for CubeSat-class spacecraft. We prove that Glass Box verification overhead is O(N_c) in the number of constitutional rules, independent of model size or spacecraft state dimension. We present a complete formal specification of the constitutional constraint grammar, seven LTL safety invariants verified by Z3 and NuSMV model checking, and a detailed worked example of Glass Box intercepting an unsafe inference request at eclipse-entry under degraded battery state. As orbital computing scales toward data center infrastructure, runtime constitutional verification is no longer a research novelty -- it is mission-critical safety infrastructure that every autonomous orbital platform will eventually require.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled agentic AI capable of complex reasoning and tool use; however, deploying such autonomy in pervasive computing environments remains challenging due to the strict memory and energy constraints of embedded microcontrollers. Existing frameworks typically assume server-class resources or continuous connectivity, leaving a gap for deeply embedded systems. This paper proposes a modular reference architecture for Embedded Agent Systems that bridges the divide between deterministic real-time control and agentic intelligence. We introduce a tiered design that decouples On-Device Agents - executing highly compressed neural networks and rule-based logic for low-latency, privacy-critical tasks - from Cloud-Augmented Agents that leverage Small Language Models (SLMs) for higher-level reasoning and planning. A key contribution is the integration of a cross-cutting Governance Layer, ensuring observability, policy enforcement, and safety across distributed fleets of autonomous devices. Rather than presenting purely empirical benchmarks, we analyze architectural design principles and trade-offs regarding latency, energy, and reliable execution in resource-constrained environments.

Proper accounting of the energy requirements and environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) systems is necessary for researchers, developers, policy makers, and users to assess the barriers to building systems at scale. With the growing complexity of pipelines and underlying infrastructure needed to develop and deploy AI systems, previous approaches for evaluating AI efficiency which focus on the costs of a single training run or an individual inference prediction are no longer sufficient. In this position paper, we enunciate the need for applying life cycle assessment to evaluate the costs of the machine learning model development and deployment pipeline to properly account for the required resources and downstream impact. Life cycle assessments enable the incorporation of costs across the full life cycle of an AI system and its underlying infrastructure, from the embodied costs associated with the physical computing hardware through the operational costs in training and inference.

Data centers now account for 4.4% of United States electricity demand, yet the grid-level effectiveness of the renewable energy certificates (RECs) and power purchase agreements (PPAs) hyperscalers use to claim carbon neutrality remains unclear. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a data center operator chooses among RECs, PPAs, and behind-the-meter colocation while generators make entry decisions under endogenous financing costs. The model identifies a timing wedge -- the mismatch between consumption and credited renewable generation -- as a central mechanism through which AI demand degrades reliability, raises prices, and increases emissions even when RECs cover 100% of annual consumption. Colocation with storage addresses this wedge directly and induces the greatest renewable entry by eliminating generator revenue risk. We test these predictions by exploiting the staggered release of large language models as a natural experiment, using difference-in-differences on a novel dataset linking AI activity to local grid outcomes. AI demand significantly increases fossil generation, wholesale prices (up to 25% in treated PJM zones), and outage frequency (0.5--1 additional outages per year) near data centers, with impacts scaling in model size. Data centers with on-site generation exhibit a sign reversal in power-quality effects, consistent with the model's prediction that behind-the-meter capacity absorbs demand spikes. Counterfactual analyses show that edge inference, spatial reallocation, and colocated storage each substantially mitigate grid impacts, while REC-only strategies do not. Together, our results demonstrate that the externalities of AI to the grid are tightly coupled to procurement design and the spatial organization of data center infrastructure.

Hallucination remains a major reliability barrier for production LLM systems, particularly in multi-agent pipelines where unsupported claims can propagate unchecked across stages. This paper adapts a HOPE-inspired Nested Learning architecture with Continuum Memory Systems (CMS) and semantic similarity caching to a hybrid benchmark of 310 prompts combining 217 epistemic-uncertainty prompts and 93 fabrication-induction stress-test prompts. A three-stage agentic pipeline orchestrated via the Open Floor Protocol (OFP) is evaluated with five KPIs -- FCD (Factual Claim Density), FGR (Factual Grounding References), FDF (Fictional Disclaimer Frequency), ECS (Explicit Contextualization Score), and OSR (Observability Score Ratio) -- aggregated into THS (Total Hallucination Score) across five weighting configurations to study mitigation-observability trade-offs. FDF, ECS, OSR, and FGR are subtracted as mitigation signals, so that a more negative THS indicates stronger mitigation. The FrontEndAgent is configured as a high-stochasticity generator (temperature = 1.0) to produce a realistic hallucination baseline, while the SecondLevelReviewer and ThirdLevelReviewer operate as progressive correctors. This asymmetric design yields end-to-end THS reductions of -31.3% to -35.9% across five weighting configurations. Semantic caching achieves 440 cache hits over 930 potential calls (47.3% hit rate), reducing LLM invocations to 490, lowering energy and CO2e footprint, and making multi-stage review pipelines operationally viable at production scale. ExtremeObservability attains the most negative final THS (-0.0709), confirming that observability-heavy configurations reinforce rather than compromise mitigation. These findings suggest that memory-augmented multi-agent designs can jointly improve factual reliability, operational efficiency, and auditability without model retraining.

Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI skill nodes self-organise into a compute swarm without any central authority. SwarmHarness has three interlocking components: a SwarmRegistry built on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for peer discovery and capability advertisement; a SwarmRouter that dispatches tasks to nodes using a utility function over capability, load, latency, and trust; and SwarmCredit, an incentive mechanism that attributes compute-credit rewards to contributing nodes via a Shapley-value approximation. Nodes earn credits by serving tasks and spend credits to submit them; idle nodes that never contribute drain credits and lose routing priority, creating a self-regulating participation economy. As nodes specialise toward high-reward skills and routing signals act as digital pheromones, the network exhibits emergent collective intelligence analogous to biological swarms. Beyond compute sharing, SwarmHarness is a foundational primitive for autonomous distributed AI agent networks in which agents hire compute, route subtasks, and settle credits without human intermediation.

Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. We recently demonstrated that orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost, with workflows consuming 4.33x more energy per successful goal than linear baselines and OOI reaching 7.63x for multi-step reasoning tasks. Separately, Raj et al. show that CPU-side processing accounts for up to 90.6% of total latency and 44% of total dynamic energy in agentic workloads. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

The expansion of data centers (DCs) drives a sustained increase in electricity demand and associated water withdrawals at generation sites. These withdrawals occur at generation sites and are virtually allocated to demand based on network power flows. Consequently, the actual water footprint of a specific load varies dynamically with generation dispatch and network conditions. Existing approaches typically rely on static statistical accounting to quantify these water footprints. However, such static methods fail to capture how dispatch optimization and workload relocation dynamically affect water withdrawals. As a result, static statistical accounting approaches remain decoupled from the optimization process, rendering them incapable of guiding workload relocation or power dispatch to mitigate water stress. To address this limitation, this paper develops an operational electricity-computation-water (ECW) nexus framework that internalizes virtual water impacts directly into power system dispatch. The framework represents dispatch optimization as a differentiable optimization layer embedded within a deep learning architecture, enabling efficient end-to-end learning of coordination policies while preserving operational feasibility. Combined with fixed-point coordination, the framework enforces consistency between virtual water attribution and physical generation-side withdrawals. Case studies on the IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus test systems demonstrate reliable convergence, exact power-water consistency, and reductions of approximately 3-5% in generation-related freshwater withdrawals under water-constrained conditions.

The rapid scaling of large language model training requires distributing GPU resources across multiple data center buildings and regions. We refer to such paradigm as "scale-across" training. As infrastructure expands, the system design space becomes increasingly intricate, encompassing new model architectures, hardware heterogeneity, and evolving communication patterns. Drawing from Meta's production experience, we highlight the complexities of deploying training jobs across a few data centers housing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. To accelerate exploration of the large design space and to enable efficient training for frontier model development, we conduct in-depth characterization of three key design dimensions: parallelism placement, parallelism scheduling, and network layer technologies. We then propose ScaleAcross Explorer, an optimizer that considers the interplay of design dimensions and holistically optimizes scale-across training. Testbed experiments and simulations demonstrate up to 64.62% training speedups over production configuration and up to 37.59% training speedups over the state-of-the-art baseline across a wide range of design points.

AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greenferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build XWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, XWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations.