06/24/2026
MIT Technology Review features Professor Ayse Coskun and her work as Chief Scientist with Emerald AI in a recent article examining solutions to the data center energy use problem: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/16/1138591/data-center-online-quickly-electric-grid-flex/
"Of all the approaches to flexibility, Emerald AI’s may be the most ambitious: asking data centers to dial into the grid’s needs. The company’s Conductor software, which can run on premises or in the cloud, builds on the research of chief scientist Coskun. Her group at Boston University showed in a pair of 2013 papers that a data center could watch the grid and help balance big power fluctuations, such as the intermittent effects of solar and wind power. By 2022, she and her colleagues had tested their methods on a cluster of 36 research servers and shown that the system could respect power limits without breaking the processes it was running."
As the data-center boom puts pressure on the grid, some companies say the answer isn’t just more power plants but software that dials down centers’ energy-guzzling ways when demand spikes.