Grid Flexibility and Distributed Inference Data Centers

Nvidia, EPRI, InfraPartners, and Prologis are piloting a fleet of roughly 25 micro data centers (5–20 MW each) co-located at utility substations across five U.S. utilities. The strategy, called 'distributed inference,' exploits the fact that AI inference workloads can be dynamically routed between locations, allowing compute to shift to whichever substation has spare capacity. This sidesteps the decade-long grid connection queues facing large data centers, reduces the need for new transmission infrastructure, and taps the ~47% of U.S. generation capacity that sits idle outside peak demand hours. Construction of the pilot fleet is targeted for late 2026, with workload rerouting expected to be needed only about 0.1% of the time.