NVIDIA believes power grids are AI-augmentable and they are likely to be a part of it

It is no surprise by now that NVIDIA is the most promising "AI Acceleration" company that provides the full solution to the inevitable "AI in everything" future. Thanks to a recent talk at Edison Electric Institute, CEO Jensen Huang managed to touch on the topic that most people feel entitled to and deserve at this point and time - Power and infrastructure.

Specifically talking about power grids, he thinks that the utility field and electrical energy sector is positively bright because the next industrial revolution is driven by AI and accelerated computing. As such, the net gain loopback will occur when the technology rolls around and benefits power grid companies in the near future.

"The greatest impact and return is in applying AI in the delivery of energy over the grid,” explained Huang to Pedro Pizarro, the chair of EEI and president and CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison.

He elaborated with a couple more examples, such as "Connecting resources and users like Google so that power grids become a smart network with digital layers, much like an app store for energy".

With this, Jensen even thinks that a future where a "free market of excessive energy buyable/sellable to neighbors" is possible through a sophisticated, full suite, and well-designed software-defined AI power grid.

The topic of AI electric grids was last publicly discussed at GTC 2024 in March where utility vendor Hubbell and startup Utilidata, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program, described a new generation of smart meters using the NVIDIA Jetson platform that utilities will deploy to process and analyze real-time grid data using AI models at the edge.

Up until a few days ago, Deloitte also chimed in and stated they are committing support to the effort as well.

On the other hand, there's an interesting digital twin case study demonstrated by Siemens Energy where they use the tech to build virtual transformers to improve predictive maintenance and boost grid resilience. Siemens Gamesa uses Omniverse and accelerated computing to optimize turbine placements for a large wind farm in terms of new power plant construction.