Pedestrian Infrastructure Partners (SIP) — the Alphabet spinout focused on creating and supporting new approaches to complex infrastructure problems in areas such as electricity, broadband and waste management — launched its latest project, a new idea for more flexible energy management of of data centers called Verrus.
Verrus integrates advanced high-power battery-based “microgrids” with software to understand and allocate power to specific tasks and applications, and is designed to address some of the power challenges posed by modern computing needs. These include spikes in cloud computing usage and larger projects — such as artificial intelligence training — that could be grouped into batches distributed over time frames when there is less demand.
Jonathan Winer, SIP’s co-founder and co-CEO, said the first three data centers designed using Verrus’ architecture will likely be located in Arizona, California and Massachusetts.
The goal is to have them up and running in 2026 or 2027. So far there are no customers signed on, though Winer said several “hyperscalers” — one of which, Alphabet, remains a major supporter of SIP after many years. before — have shown interest in the project for when it goes online and will likely become one of its target segments when seeking investment. (Along with the new venture, SIP is also launching the Data Center Agility Initiative to bring together stakeholders such as energy companies, tech giants and regulators.)
Winer described Verrus as having “gigawatt-scale ambitions.” A data center to match that scale, he estimated, could cost $1 billion to put together, with hundreds of millions of dollars in equity capital needed to get it off the ground. That’s likely to happen only after construction begins and customers start signing up, he said. In addition to Alphabet, other SIP backers currently include Ontario Teachers’ and StepStone.
Winer said SIP has been developing the project in stealth mode for nearly two years and that it was an offshoot of other research she had done in power grid management, combined with SIP’s work with companies focused on shifting load for better management. energy consumption. Noticing the strain that data centers in particular have on the power grid, SIP turned its attention to these data centers themselves.
The explosion of cloud computing and AI data calculations is “a real challenge to the grid,” he said, and typically data centers are at capacity. “To add what we will need for both the AI challenge and general cloud computing, there will need to be a new approach to power management,” he noted. Simply building more data centers, whether operated by third-party data center operators or the hyperscalers themselves, will not meet the demand.
Today, the extra power comes from diesel generators and the use of redundant electrical systems in the data centers themselves. Verrus’ proposal is instead to use what Winer refers to as a “microgrid” that would include a high-capacity battery, meaning it would be more flexible in deploying power to specific areas or even projects in a data center.
In turn, this means that an AI training job, for example, could essentially be paused and clustered and run at a different time, versus, say, an enterprise cloud service that might require demand response.” five nine”.
As SIP sees it, simply adding more data centers — which has been the approach until now — is not a sustainable approach in the long term.
“The challenge with adding data centers to the grid is not the 340 days a year the grid is not maxed out. The grid is more than happy to provide power on days it is not in power,” he said. “The real challenge is the 20 days a year where for a few hours a day they can’t service the load.” A flexible power management system would allow for what he described as “islands” in the data center during those hours.
The approach Verrus proposes to take highlights how energy use and consumption continues to evolve in the tech world, but also how energy is still a persistent, costly and ultimately resource-intensive issue that needs so much focus and innovation as much as the software and hardware that rely on it to evolve.
Verrus isn’t the only technology company looking at how to build and use super-capacity battery architecture to manage electricity distribution. Instagrid, a startup from Germany, recently raised seed funding, making batteries to help users manage energy in use cases where they are completely off the grid.
