Skarlatos Receives Scott Institute 2025 Seed Funding for AI Data Center Energy Demand Research

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Dimitrios Skarlatos, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has been awarded one of seven 2025 Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation seed grants.

Dimitrios Skarlatos, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has been awarded one of seven 2025 Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation seed grants. Skarlatos will use support from the Scott Institute award to tackle the growing energy demand of AI data centers — a theme that also took center stage during Energy Week 2025. 
 
The growing computational demands of AI have led to extensive deployments of AI hardware, such as GPUs and accelerators, in datacenters. However, these deployments come with significant energy challenges. The power consumption of recent NVIDIA GPUs exceeds 1000 watts, and global data centers now consume over 200 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity annually—more than entire U.S. states like Pennsylvania, which uses around 150 TWh per year. Looking ahead, information and communication technology is projected to account for 5–10% of global electricity demand by 2030, highlighting the urgent need for energy-efficient AI infrastructure.

Skarlatos notes "the 'Energy-efficient AI Datacenters' project aims to reimagine datacenter AI infrastructure and this award will help build a proof-of-concept that enables fine-grained, efficient power management without requiring changes to existing AI software stacks".  The ambitious goal of this project is to ultimately improve performance and efficiency of AI infrastructure by a factor of 20.