Smaller municipal utilities like Silicon Valley Power are getting squeezed by the artificial intelligence build-out. Although Silicon Valley Power is working on doubling its capacity, the utility can’t keep up with rising demand from its customers, such as Nvidia and Intel, that want more immediately.

“All the spare capacity we may have had in the past has all been spoken for,” said Nicolas Procos, the utility director at Silicon Valley Power. “So now you’re talking about building out the system, or coming up with those creative solutions.”

As one of those solutions, Silicon Valley Power recently enlisted a two-year-old start-up called Emerald AI. Using its proprietary software, Emerald helps data centers be more flexible in their power consumption based on input from utilities.

Read more in the New York Times here.

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