NVIDIA Emerald AI flexible AI factories grid assets collaboration

NVIDIA and Emerald AI announced a collaboration with AES, Constellation, Invenergy, NextEra Energy, Nscale Energy and Power, and Vistra to develop a new class of AI factories. The factories will connect to the grid faster, generate AI tokens and intelligence, and operate as flexible energy assets that support grid reliability. The announcement was made March 23 at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston. The factories will use the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design, which includes the DSX Flex software library for connecting AI factories to power grid services. Emerald AI's Conductor platform will orchestrate computational flexibility alongside onsite generation, batteries, and other behind the meter resources. This coordination is intended to help operators meet power targets, protect priority workloads, shorten time on bridge power, and support larger and faster interconnections. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said AI factories are the engines of the intelligence era and every system must be designed together, including energy, compute, networking, and cooling as one architecture. Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram said AI factories produce tremendously valuable AI tokens and knowledge and with DSX Flex they can provide measurable relief back to the grid. Executives from the energy companies also commented on the effort. AES CEO Andres Gluski said grid flexibility will be key to addressing AI demand while supporting system reliability. Constellation president and CEO Joe Dominguez said data centers have enormous potential to unlock energy infrastructure investment and address the need for additional capacity through demand response. Other leaders from Invenergy, NextEra Energy, Nscale Energy and Power, and Vistra expressed similar views on using co located generation and flexible operations to speed time to power and strengthen the grid.