How AI can solve its own energy crisis | Varun Sivaram
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
The AI revolution and our aging power grid are on a historic collision course, threatening to stall innovation and raise energy costs for everyone. Physicist and AI grid futurist Varun Sivaram reveals how we might turn this looming crisis into a once-in-a-generation opportunity — unlocking massive power capacity, lowering costs and accelerating the energy future we’ve been waiting for.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm your host, Elise Hugh. |
| 0:13.6 | The need for AI computing power is growing at an exponential rate. |
| 0:18.1 | And while many are excited about the AI revolution, we're also facing a terrible |
| 0:22.5 | truth. The world's resources are being taxed at an unprecedented rate by the soaring energy |
| 0:28.0 | needs of AI technologies. In this talk, grid futurist Varun Sivaram shares his work developing |
| 0:35.4 | flexible AI data centers, |
| 0:37.8 | how they could actually help power our energy grid, |
| 0:40.6 | and how to support the AI boom but responsibly. |
| 0:48.2 | On a blistering hot day in Phoenix, Arizona, |
| 0:52.6 | as a million air conditioners drove up demand on the power grid, |
| 0:57.3 | a cluster of energy-hungry artificial intelligence servers bucked the trend. |
| 1:03.5 | They actually helped. For three hours, these AI computers at an Oracle data center |
| 1:09.7 | dropped their power consumption by 25% |
| 1:12.7 | to provide perfectly timed relief during that day's peak demand. |
| 1:17.2 | And, critically, the advanced Nvidia chips |
| 1:20.8 | continued to meet the stringent performance requirements of their tasks, |
| 1:26.3 | training, fine-tuning, and using AI large language |
| 1:30.3 | models. Our team at Emerald AI orchestrated this first-of-a-kind demonstration of flexible |
| 1:38.3 | AI computing. And we're not alone. Google's also made impressive strides. |
| 1:48.8 | Scaling up our technologies across the country and around the world could help solve one of the biggest challenges of our time, |
| 1:53.5 | powering the AI revolution, |
... |
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