Crusoe plans to roll out 5 GW of medium voltage AI UPS from ON.energy across its hyperscale campuses beginning in 2026, a system built to ride through grid disturbances rather than trip offline.
July turned that risk into a hard lesson. A downed line in northern Virginia knocked more than 3 GW offline in roughly 30 seconds, twice the size of a 2024 incident, and the voltage swing rippled all the way to Chicago. PJM needed 10 minutes to rebalance the grid.
Crusoe casts its choice as a design decision, not a compliance checkbox. AI clusters swing from tens to hundreds of megawatts in under a second as thousands of GPUs bounce between compute and communication, and traditional low-voltage UPS systems answer that by disconnecting entirely.
At gigawatt scale, those simultaneous disconnects start to become the disturbance themselves.
How the battery replaces dummy compute
Running dummy matrix multiplies to flatten load chews through close to 6% of energy, about 480 GWh a year at 1 GW, plus another 192 GWh for cooling, for roughly 672 GWh wasted. Firmware power floors at 80 to 90% of TDP still bleed around 7%, roughly 600 GWh a year, and leave residual swings.