Amid nationwide outcry over data centers, OpenAI said Monday it will use less electricity at a new data center campus when the power grid is strained.
The Sam Altman-run AI giant said it plans to turn down the juice during extreme weather or emergencies at its planned data center site in Effingham County, Georgia — where locals protested the $30 billion project over the summer.
The sprawling data center campus outside of Savannah will need an estimated 3.2 gigawatts of power, according to OpenAI. It’s expected to launch in 2028.
Under its “Grid Protectors Program” OpenAI will cut up to 1 gigawatt enough to power about 700,000 homes — to help stabilize the local grid as needed, the company said.
“Our ambition is to make this kind of flexibility a core part of how we build and operate future campuses,” OpenAI said in a statement.
“That means designing facilities to reduce electricity use when needed and working with utilities to agree on how much demand can be reduced, how quickly and for how long.”
OpenAI also said it would “work with grid operators to supply power from on-site generation or storage, and use batteries and power controls to smooth changes in demand.”
Georgia Power appeared to welcome the policy.
“We appreciate the leadership and thoughtfulness of the OpenAI team as they prepare to bring significant investment and cutting-edge technology to Georgia,” said Aaron Mitchell, a senior VP of for the utility.
“At Georgia Power, we are working every day to help ensure that growth from data centers and other large-energy users brings value for our customers through higher reliability and lower prices,” Mitchell said in a statement back in July.
Effingham County is the only data center campus OpenAI has planned to launch on its own to date. It runs 28 data center facilities nationwide, according to Baxtel, a data center research platform. It’s also working on a campus in partnership with Oracle in Wisconsin.
Companies, federal agencies, and state leaders have been trying to find ways to make data centers more flexible, Reuters noted. The ability for centers to shift use of electricity could save $40 billion to $150 billion in capital investments over the next decade, according to a Duke University study.
“Demand response can materially soften peak impacts,” Alexander Kheder, an analyst with BMI, a multinational research firm, told Reuters. “But scaling curtailment agreements across hundreds of new facilities will demand significant capital expenditure and coordinated policy frameworks.”
Still, public opinion has soured on data centers.
People would rather see a nuclear power plant built in their neighborhood than a data center, a May Gallup poll found, with a whopping 71% of Americans opposed to the latter.