Electricity is a key raw material for artificial intelligence, but new processing techniques outstrip the ability of data center operators to manage their relationship with the power grid, forcing them to throttle down by as much as 30%.
“There is so much power squandered in these AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote speech at the company’s annual GTC customer conference. “Every unused watt is revenue lost,” the company proclaimed during the annual presentation.
Today, start-up Niv-AI has emerged from stealth with $12 million in seed funding to solve this problem by precisely measuring GPU power use with new sensors and developing tools to manage it more efficiently.
The Tel Aviv-based start-up was founded last year by CEO Tomer Timor and CTO Edward Kizis, and is backed by Glilot Capital, Grove Ventures, Arc VC, Encoded VC, Leap Forward, and Aurora Capital Partners. The company declined to share its valuation.
As frontier labs operate thousands of GPUs in concert to train and run advanced models, there are frequent, millisecond-scale power demand surges as the processors switch between computation tasks and communicating with other GPUs.
These surges make it difficult for data centers to manage the power they draw from the grid. To avoid being left without sufficient electricity, data centers pay for temporary energy storage to cover surges, or throttle their GPU usage. Both cases reduce the return on investments in expensive chips.
“We just can’t continue building data centers the way we build them now,” Lior Handlesman, a partner at Grove Ventures who sits on Niv’s board.
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The first step in Niv’s roadmap understanding …