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Varun Sivaram

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Emerald Ai

Search every verified Varun Sivaram interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Varun Sivaram, founder and CEO of Emerald AI, has been promoting the use of flexible data centers to address AI's growing energy demands. He has stated that there is roughly 100 gigawatts of existing stranded power capacity on current grids that could support AI data center growth without major new infrastructure, and that his company's software platform orchestrates temporal, spatial, and resource flexibility to modulate computational load and reduce strain on the grid. Sivaram has described a "grand bargain" where regulators offer faster and larger grid access to data centers that can reduce power consumption during peak stress, arguing this can keep rates affordable and grids reliable. Sivaram has also discussed the launch of the AI Energy Management Alliance, which he said was founded by Emerald AI, Google, and Nvidia, and includes companies such as Anthropic, AES, Constellation, NRG, and National Grid. He has contrasted the U.S. with China, saying China will have 400 gigawatts of spare capacity for AI by 2030, while the U.S. can only plug in 30 gigawatts of the 70 gigawatts of data centers it wants to connect over the next two years. He has also warned of a potential future where AI companies go off-grid or into space due to interconnection delays, and has argued that flexible data centers can provide a $2 billion net present value uplift for a 200-megawatt facility connected a year earlier.

Recent appearances

  • Using 'Flexibility' to Solve AI's Energy Bottleneck with Varun Sivaram, Founder and CEO - Emerald AI

    October 16, 2026 · 📺 Boston Consulting Group

    Billions of dollars are being spent on new CapEx to satisfy the growing energy needs of AI data centres. But one firm is convinced that the answer isn’t building new capacity, but being smarter in utilizing the power we already have. Varun Sivaram is the Founder and CEO of Emerald AI, a company whose software aims to make data centres more ‘flexible’, by intelligently modulating their computational load, and avoiding demand spikes that could overload the grid. So what does a truly flexible data centre look like? How much capacity could Emerald’s software actually hope to free up? And what…

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  • Demand for electricity is soaring: how can our power systems keep up?

    October 08, 2026 · 📺 World Economic Forum

    Global demand for electricity is soaring, as wars in Ukraine and Iran squeeze fossil fuel supply chains and the race for AI makes data centres a significant power consumer. Divya Reddy, Manager of Energy Initiatives at the World Economic Forum sets out the challenge, and Varun Sivaram, Founder and CEO of Emerald AI explains how data centres can be made "good citizens to communities and power grids alike". Links: World Economic Forum Centre for Energy and Materials: https://centres.weforum.org/centre-fo... Future of Power Systems: https://initiatives.weforum.org/futur... Innovation Playbook fo…

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  • AI’s next bottleneck is energy. Varun Sivaram has a plan

    September 22, 2026 · 📺 Axios Live and Axios

    Axios’ Amy Harder sits down with Emerald AI co-founder and CEO Varun Sivaram to discuss one of the biggest constraints facing the AI boom: energy. Sivaram argues that demand for AI compute is accelerating while the U.S. power grid struggles to connect new data centers fast enough. He explains why flexible AI data centers could reduce power use when the grid is under stress, helping utilities add more computing capacity without waiting years for major infrastructure upgrades. The conversation covers growing community opposition to data centers, Emerald AI’s new AI Energy Management Alliance,…

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  • Forging the Energy Solutions of the Future

    September 21, 2026 · 📺 Axios Live

    Axios House hosts an event in New York City exploring how America can build the energy infrastructure needed to support AI, advanced manufacturing and electrification. Axios national energy correspondent Amy Harder and publisher Nicholas Johnston speak with Amazon Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst, GE Vernova Power CEO Eric Gray, Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram and Energy Empire host Jigar Shah about scaling power, strengthening the grid and aligning investment with innovation.

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  • Newsom Orders AI Lab Kill Switch

    September 18, 2026 · 📺 Bloomberg Podcasts

    On today's show, Emerald AI CEO Varun Sivaram, Stonecourt Capital Partner Rick Davis, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center ...VARUN SIVARAM OF EMERALD AI HERE WITH US ON "BALANCE OF POWER." ♪ CHARLIE: IT IS 1:21 ON WALL STREET.

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  • Newsom Signs Order Requiring AI Labs Develop ‘Kill Switch’ | Balance of Power

    September 18, 2026 · 📺 Bloomberg Podcasts

    Emerald AI CEO Varun Sivaram. Stonecourt Capital Partner Rick Davis and Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center Visiting ...

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  • Can AI help save the grid?

    August 06, 2026 · 📺 GridX Inc.

    Growing up in Silicon Valley, Varun Sivaram didn’t look to Elon Musk or Sergey Brin to learn about success stories. He looked to his dad, a material scientist who immigrated from India. But Varun’s own dreams of pursuing a career in technology took a circuitous path. His physics lab at Oxford discovered a promising new solar material, but when he emerged from graduate school in 2012, it was no time to launch a renewables startup. After a successful early career pursuing his other love, foreign relations, he pivoted to tech. In 2024, Varun founded Emerald AI, which helps data centers adjust t…

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  • Critical Capital: Varun Sivaram -- The trillion-dollar collision between AI and the grid

    August 05, 2026 · 📺 Crux Climate

    About the episode The rapid rise of AI has sparked a multi-trillion-dollar collision between our aging power grid and massive, energy-hungry AI "factories." Unlike traditional cloud data centers, AI training workloads are incredibly dense and volatile, capable of spiking or dropping power demand in milliseconds and threatening grid stability. Dr. Varun Sivaram, CEO of Emerald AI, says the solution lies in load flexibility. By using software to dynamically shift AI workloads across time (temporal flexibility) or across the country (spatial flexibility), data centers can adapt to the grid ra…

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  • AI CEO Series: Dr. Varun Sivaram

    July 06, 2026 · 📺 S&P Global Market Intelligence

    This episode of our AI CEO series looks at the potential for AI capabilities to address one of AI's largest challenges – energy availability. Dr. Varun Sivaram, founder and CEO of Emerald AI, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore how greater flexibility is AI workloads can unlock unused capacity. Traditionally, data center construction has focused on delivering peak capacity, even at those times when it may not be needed. That doesn't mesh well with a power grid that is already under stress. AI intelligence can shift workloads dynamically to reduce data center demands when the power grid needs…

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  • AI Factories: How Emerald AI Stabilizes the Grid

    May 14, 2026 · 📺 SAIL Media and Makora

    Varun Sivaram discusses the critical power constraints facing the AI industry, the shift toward "power-flexible" data centers, and how Emerald AI is enabling massive compute clusters to operate in harmony with the electric grid. Varun explains how their "Conductor" platform helps "AI Factories" dynamically adjust their power consumption to prevent grid overloads—potentially doubling the capacity for AI infrastructure in the US without waiting years for expensive grid upgrades. Varun Sivaram is the CEO and Founder of Emerald AI, a startup dedicated to making large-scale AI infrastructure a fle…

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  • Powering the AI Era

    April 22, 2026 · 📺 Radical Ventures

    Varun Sivaram, Founder & CEO of Emerald AI, joins Radical Partners Molly Welch and Rob Toews to explore what's actually holding back AI infrastructure. While the conversation around AI bottlenecks tends to focus on chips and models, Varun explains why the binding constraint is power, from grid capacity limits and interconnection backlogs to the widening gap between compute demand and energy supply. Drawing on his path from senior energy official in the Biden White House to CTO of India's largest solar company to founding Emerald AI, the discussion unpacks why the fix is software, not just more…

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  • Can Data Centres Play Nice With The Grid? | Ep249: Varun Sivaram & Steve Smith

    March 19, 2026 · 📺 Cleaning Up Podcast

    This week on Cleaning Up, host Michael Liebreich sits down with Varun Sivaram and Steve Smith to explore one of the most ...

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“If you're a 200-megawatt data center, and you get connected one year earlier, you get to be upsized just a little bit from 200 to 230 megawatts, you can switch out to the latest NVIDIA GPUs into liquid cooling. Well that's a 15% NPV uplift. That is a $2 billion net present value increase for you. We will unlock $4 trillion of investment if we can deploy Emerald AI and unlock that 100 gigawatts of available stranded p”

“There are three fallacies that folks tend to have. The first fallacy is we can just bully our way to getting the grid capacity we want. I do think some of the largest entities will be able to get power for months, or even years going forward. But if you don't have an army of lobbyists and a massive energy team, you're in a race for a diminishing set of power connections. The easy ones have already been taken. The ind”

“Think of the grid as a big, massive super highway. It's got eight lanes, right? And most of the year, it's quite empty. There aren't very many cars on that road. But two times a month, just two times month, that highway faces peak rush hour, where the cars are clogging up that road, that's like a hot summer day when everybody's using their air conditioners and the grid is really stressed out. But most of the year, th”

“The energy consumption of AI data centres is massive. Now, it hasn't always been massive. The International Energy Agency reports that historically data centres represented 1% or less of global electricity consumption. Now, that figure is set to hit 3% by 2030. Still doesn't sound like a big number, but it's important to note the growth rate. AI data centre globally grew by 50% in their energy consumption just over a”

“I'm really proud of this new alliance. Thank you by the way for breaking the story. This alliance brings together Emerald AI, my company, which founded along with Google and Nvidia. And we brought 20 companies, Anthropic on the AI side. On the energy side, AES, Constellation, NRG, National Grid, energy giants. We brought the whole AI and energy ecosystem together for one very specific thing: power flexible AI data ce”

“There are two potential futures ahead of us. I want to be clear about how stark the choices, Amy. One potential future is where AI data centers, the AI industry says, 'My goodness, it's so hard to connect to the grid. They make me wait more than 10 years, and I have to understand all these crazy regulations. I'm just going to go off the grid.' Intuitively, that sounds like a good idea, right? Or I might even go into ”

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