Collaboration to develop smaller data centres for the AI era

Ben Sooter, Director of Agentic AI Initiatives & Distributed AI Architecture at EPRI, and Bal Aujla, Director, Head of Advanced Research and Engineering, InfraPartners, discuss the collaboration between EPRI, Prologis, NVIDIA, and InfraPartners to study smaller-scale data centres designed for distributed inference. The collaborators will assess the deployment of micro data centres - ranging from 5 to 20 megawatts - at or near utility substations with available grid capacity that can be quickly set up. The goal is to bring inference capabilities - the process of generating real-time responses from trained models - closer to where data is generated and consumed, while making better use of underutilised infrastructure and reducing pressure on congested transmission systems.