Data centers will accept power curtailment tiers for faster grid interconnection
Varun Sivaram · The rise of flexible data centers · Apr 9, 2026 · at 16:44
Emerald AI founder Varun Sivaram explains to Shayle Kann how utility flexibility tiers can solve grid bottleneck constraints for data centers.
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“I believe that if electric power utilities and grid operators offered these, a range of different service tiers, just like on the compute side, the cloud operators offer a range of different service tiers to their end AI customers, innovation would solve this problem. And you would absolutely have Data centers taking advantage of the lower service tiers, and they're not that low, by the way, it's just a, you know, call it 50, or a hundred, or 200 hours a year that you'd have to curtail. Data centers would very happily take utilities up on these lower service tiers in order to accelerate their connection or get a larger connection.”
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