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This study critically examines the disconnect between AI-driven workload control and sustainability metrics in data centers, revealing a significant gap where existing literature ignores water withdrawal and embodied carbon. The authors propose CLEAR-DC, a new methodological framework that couples control policies with demand elasticity to provide a holistic view of net benefits across energy, carbon, and water usage. By validating findings through simulation and physical hardware on a subset of papers, the work establishes a necessary reporting schema for future AI infrastructure research.
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Artificial Intelligence for Energy Optimization in Data Centers

arXiv3 min read

arXiv:2609.03716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data centers are increasingly optimized by artificial intelligence and, at the same time, increasingly loaded by it. The literature treats these as two unrelated problems: control studies model workload as an exogenous arrival process, while sustainability studies model infrastructure as a fixed multiplier. We screen roughly 194 papers retrieved through a documented protocol, code 63 of them, and report what the coding shows. Of 28 primary control-oriented studies, 18 are validated in simulation alone and 5 reach physical hardware or a production facility; none account for water withdrawal, and none account for embodied carbon. Reported savings intervals across four technique families overlap almost completely, which means the field cannot presently rank its own methods. Ten recurring gaps are scored for consequence and tractability, and we set out CLEAR-DC, a framework coupling a control-policy branch to a workload-demand branch through an explicit elasticity term, reads out net rather than direct benefit, and emits a schema-conformant record covering energy, carbon, water, embodied share and validation venue. The framework is an architectural and methodological proposal, not a trained system; the contribution we defend empirically is the corpus analysis and the reporting schema derived from it. Coding sheet, derived statistics and all result artifacts: https://github.com/Kimalice/AI-for-Energy-Optimization-in-Data-Centers-Closing-the-Optimizer-Load-Loop

Abstract:Data centers are increasingly optimized by artificial intelligence and, at the same time, increasingly loaded by it. The literature treats these as two unrelated problems: control studies model workload as an exogenous arrival process, while sustainability studies model infrastructure as a fixed multiplier. We screen roughly 194 papers retrieved through a documented protocol, code 63 of them, and report what the coding shows. Of 28 primary control-oriented studies, 18 are validated in simulation alone and 5 reach physical hardware or a production facility; none account for water withdrawal, and none account for embodied carbon. Reported savings intervals across four technique families overlap almost completely, which means the field cannot presently rank its own methods. Ten recurring gaps are scored for consequence and tractability, and we set out CLEAR-DC, a framework coupling a control-policy branch to a workload-demand branch through an explicit elasticity term, reads out net rather than direct benefit, and emits a schema-conformant record covering energy, carbon, water, embodied share and validation venue. The framework is an architectural and methodological proposal, not a trained system; the contribution we defend empirically is the corpus analysis and the reporting schema derived from it. Coding sheet, derived statistics and all result artifacts: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.03716 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.03716v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.03716 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 300 words

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