It was also a simulation. In December 2025, engineers sought to test a new breed of data center built to be flexible about its electricity needs, so they re-created the energy demand facing the UK’s grid during a match from the 2020 Euro tournament. They wanted to see how their software, called Conductor, would have responded had it been online at the time.

Conductor is the signature product of Emerald AI, a firm based in Washington, DC, that’s part of a wave of companies trying to figure out whether data centers can work within the confines of the existing electric grid.

This year, Emerald is set to deploy Conductor in a new facility in the part of Virginia known as Data Center Alley, this time connected to the live grid. When overall demand spikes, Conductor will turn down the power used by the data center, while making sure its servers still carry out their timeliest and most important jobs. Emerald’s partners on the project—which include Nvidia and the giant data-center operator Digital Realty—bill it as one of the world’s first “power-flexible AI factories.”

Demonstrating that data centers can participate in this kind of give-and-take could ease what many tech leaders identify as the bottleneck in getting facilities online: It takes far longer to get approval for, construct, and connect new power plants than to build data centers. PJM, the grid operator in Virginia and the largest one in the US, for instance, needs eight years to bring new generation online, according to RMI, an energy research and advocacy group. “We need to solve the energy equation,” says Josh Parker, head of sustainability at Nvidia. “AI factory flexibility is the bridge between the incredible demand for AI and the immediate limitations of our energy grid.”