The rise of electricity-guzzling data centers has forced the AI industry to get creative about finding power. One of the latest ideas: Build micro data centers next to utility substations and operate them in concert, shifting the computation around based on power availability. That’s the approach Nvidia and its collaborators are taking in a new pilot project they plan to build later this year. They’ll construct about 25 of these small data centers, each ranging from 5 to 20 megawatts, across 5 utilities in the United States. If one substation is overloaded with power demand, or if there’s an outage, the compute will be shifted to a different data center near a substation that has spare capacity.

To develop the fleet, Nvidia is partnering with data center builder InfraPartners, real estate service provider Prologis, and the nonprofit EPRI (formerly known as the Electric Power Research Institute). The project aims to demonstrate a new way for data centers to be more flexible and accommodating of electricity availability. It’s also a way for data center developers to quickly secure power from the grid—an increasingly precious commodity, even in small chunks. “We started looking at…