'Spikey' AI Compute Calls for More and Better Batteries
Interview with Brandon Smith of ZincFive and Nabeel Mahmood of Nomad Futurist
Featured Clip:
Episode Overview:
Data center batteries are no longer simply "backup insurance" for power disruptions, and are now a core part of digital infrastructure allowing efficient use of energy as well as unbroken uptime, say Brandon Smith, VP of Global Sales and Product at ZincFive and Nabeel Mahmood, a longtime data center operator and now the co-founder of Nomad Futurist Institute.
This episode of Cool Vector dives deep into advances in battery technology and the realities of power availability across the digital infrastructure landscape.
Among the key takeaways:
• AI's uniquely volatile power demand — with GPU clusters spiking to 180% of idle draw in milliseconds — has forced the industry to treat batteries as active performance assets rather than passive backup, fundamentally changing how they're specified and budgeted.
• Lithium-ion's recycling challenges and finite mineral supply have created real openings for alternative chemistries like nickel zinc, and the broader R&D wave lithium triggered has made it commercially viable to revisit technologies that were previously too expensive to scale.
• The zero-emission aspirations of the data center industry remain aspirational. While batteries are a genuine enabler of renewable integration, the sheer power demand of hyperscale AI campuses has effectively outpaced the available supply of wind and solar, pushing operators toward gas turbines and other non-grid sources that quietly undermine the industry's public sustainability commitments.
• "All roads lead to China" in battery supply chains. China's lead in battery technology stems from a decade-plus head start in R&D investment, giving companies like CATL and BYD a supply chain grip that Western operators are only beginning to seriously work around.
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Full Transcript:
‘Spikey’ AI Compute Calls for More and Better Batteries
Brandon Smith, VP of Global Sales and Product, ZincFiveNabeel Mahmood, Co-Founder, Nomad Futurist
David Snow: Hello and welcome to Cool Vector. I’m David Snow, your host, and today we’re joined by Brandon Smith, Vice President of Global Sales and Product at ZincFive, and Nabeel Mahmood, Co-Founder of Nomad Futurist and a longtime executive in the data center industry. Gentlemen, welcome to Cool Vector. Great to have you here.
Nabeel Mahmood: Brandon and I get to do it all together, because I work with ZincFive as well, so it’s wonderful to be here on stage with Brandon.
David Snow: Let’s learn about batteries in the global data center market — batteries in digital infrastructure. It’s a hot topic. Maybe we could start by asking Brandon: why are people talking about batteries and data centers right now?
[CLIP 1: Why batteries are a big topic in data centers today]
Brandon Smith: Batteries have always been in data center infrastructure. They are the key backbone between the utility dropping and a long-duration product like a diesel gen set. They’ve been instrumental in any mission-critical infrastructure design — data centers, hospitals, 911 centers, anything that literally cannot lose power.
Brandon Smith: But in the past they’ve been viewed as a commodity, a liability, a pain point. With the boom in data centers, the power density push, and certainly how AI data centers operate and how they affect the electrical infrastructure, batteries have now become a key component in advancing data center design and allowing AI compute to run at max capacity.
Nabeel Mahmood: We are at that turning point whereby the industry has actually finally realized that batteries are no longer just backup insurance. They’re becoming a core part of the infrastructure — the strongest link in the chain for continuity.
Nabeel Mahmood: One of the things we’ve realized, particularly in the last two years, is the spiky nature of the loads — something we did not experience for the first four decades of compute. With the right chemistry, we are now able to address that spiky nature of large language models and artificial intelligence to ensure continuity for longer periods of time. It used to be like buying insurance — it was somewhere, nobody knew where. But now batteries are that critical element for sustainability and continuity of any digital infrastructure.
David Snow: Let’s dig in a bit to the word ‘spiky’ that you used. Tell us about that.
Nabeel Mahmood: The spiky nature of the compute comes from large language models. You run an algorithm or a model and all of a sudden it starts to compute more than what you designed that environment for. Where is that energy coming from? It’s being leveraged from the storage environment — the energy storage device, really the battery. It buys a few seconds, maybe half a minute, ensuring that the infrastructure isn’t drawing extra power through the UPSs and transfer switches. It captures that little bit of unplanned time. Otherwise it can bring the entire infrastructure down, and the cost of that downtime can be hundreds of millions of dollars.
David Snow: Brandon, can you paint a scenario for us in which a battery would kick in in the era of AI data centers and large language models?
Brandon Smith: The term peak shaving has been used in energy storage for a long time — trimming the high usage of power because demand comes in peaks and troughs, and in the troughs you’re refilling the battery. AI does something similar. The way GPUs string together in parallel computing clusters, they create power demand with very high spiky peaks and very low troughs, as the GPUs ramp up to crunch a piece of data and then ramp back down to verify that calculation.
Brandon Smith: If a customer is running a very intense large language model, these electrical spikes can be 150 to 180% of the idle power demand of the chip. The duration can be 50 milliseconds, maybe as long as one second. These cycles can happen as frequently as every second, and they happen during training. These spikes ripple through electrical infrastructure and can cause a lot of issues. Even Nvidia themselves put battery solutions in the IT rack, near the IT rack, at the UPS, or even at the grid — to absorb these 50-millisecond spikes and charge during the downtime. That allows the grid, the utility, and nearby homes to avoid really high power draws that the utility simply can’t support at that frequency and rate.
David Snow: Can you talk about the advancement of battery technology in recent years? When a large data center goes down, it sounds like you’re going to need quite a lot of power. Are there batteries out there that are sufficient to meet that kind of demand?
Brandon Smith: There are a couple of different battery formats. They can look like a AA or AAA for certain chemistries — something you’d put in a walkie-talkie. Some look like a car battery. You string them together in series to bring the voltage up and in parallel to bring the power up, and you build battery rooms or containers — as big as a bedroom — full of batteries to support one fraction of that data center’s power demand.
Brandon Smith: Diesel gen sets traditionally take 30 to 50 seconds to spin up and synchronize. Batteries have been that backbone to cover that gap. With the development of lithium-ion, which kicked off a chemistry revolution, a lot of R&D went into battery processes, manufacturing, materials, and chemistries like nickel zinc. What ZincFive has developed has benefited from that R&D that lithium brought to market, allowing us to commercialize a chemistry originally created by Thomas Edison.
Brandon Smith: This technology revolution has allowed our chemistry and others to come to market at the perfect time, because the chemistries that have been in the market for the last 50 years can’t do what AI factories and large language compute models need from battery technologies today.
David Snow: Nabeel, you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about sustainability in digital infrastructure. Can you make the connection between batteries and greater sustainability and greener power in digital infrastructure?
Nabeel Mahmood: Batteries aren’t green by themselves. I believe batteries enable flexibility as the models are changing, and that flexibility is what makes sustainability practical rather than theoretical. With batteries, data centers can shift when they draw power from the grid, avoid peak carbon-intensity periods, and reduce reliance on diesel generators. It also makes it possible to integrate intermittent renewables like wind or solar. Without storage, renewable energy often goes to waste. It used to be the weakest link in the chain. Now it is the strongest link — connecting and collaborating with all the core components of the infrastructure.
Brandon Smith: There’s also the sustainability of the battery technologies themselves. Lithium batteries have a really difficult recycling story. Lead acid has been around a long time and is highly recyclable, but the recycling process is extremely emissions-intensive. At ZincFive, sustainability is what we do. Our technology is recyclable like lead acid, but we’ve removed the smelting process. And nickel zinc batteries in the data center application last sometimes three times as long as legacy chemistries, which plays well into the recycling story.
David Snow: Since the two of you are battery experts and advocates, you have an interesting view of sustainability commitments within the data center world. We all know there were serious mandates for reduced carbon footprints, zero emissions at some future point. And yet in this existential competitive battle, a lot of those green goals have gone out the window. But in order to get back to a world where people are using more intermittent power sources — solar, wind — you’re going to need the batteries to be there when the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining.
Nabeel Mahmood: Are we there yet? Not today. Renewables can’t really run a data center as of right now. There are other renewables, such as hydrogen — blue hydrogen being an example — that could be leveraged in collaboration with the right storage device when there’s variability in data usage.
Brandon Smith: The scale is the issue. If we were still building 10, 20, or 50-megawatt sites, it might be a little easier to truly build a green energy facility. When we’re talking about gigawatt campuses, it gets a lot more difficult to run that facility off wind or solar. A lot of people are turning to gas turbines and other sources of energy that aren’t the grid but aren’t necessarily green — unless it’s hydrogen. The renewable footprint has started to reduce significantly, whether it’s wind, solar, or any other means of generating energy. It’s improving. Are we there yet? Not really, but we’re hoping sooner than later.
David Snow: What happens if you don’t spend money on battery technology? You could end up with some sort of downtime that would be catastrophic and far more expensive than the cost of a battery. Help us understand where batteries fit into the overall budget for a data center project and how it relates to financial performance and returns.
Brandon Smith: There are two stories. The first is the backup — bridging the gap between utility and some long-duration storage device. That can be worth millions and millions if you drop the load for just a minute. SLA agreements, uptime agreements, can be quite expensive if they’re not met. You can spend millions of dollars on batteries to save tens of millions on lost revenue.
Brandon Smith: The other story is around AI workloads. You’re buying a Ferrari and you want to drive at 215 miles an hour on the Autobahn, but you have a speed limiter because this dynamic workload is wreaking havoc on your electrical infrastructure. Batteries have a second play in the data center space — to directly increase the quantity of compute and how fast you can drive that high-performance machine you spent most of your CapEx budget on.
Nabeel Mahmood: The most important — and largest — operating expense in a data center is actually energy. Batteries directly affect that line item. When batteries are treated as an emergency asset, they lose their value. But when designed and treated as a financial and operational asset, batteries become part of the profit equation versus a cost equation.
David Snow: Let’s talk about battery production. We know construction of data centers, particularly in the United States, is being hampered by supply chain issues and labor shortages. In the world of batteries, are there supply chain issues or materials that aren’t in sufficient supply to deliver as many batteries as people want?
Brandon Smith: Starting with the minerals: lithium is a finite resource. That’s one of the drawbacks of deploying lithium-ion batteries everywhere — it’s difficult to fill every single niche with lithium-based batteries. For nickel and zinc, they’re the fourth and fifth most abundant minerals in the Earth’s crust. We have a lot of material to work with, and they’re not rare, which allows us to source from all over the world.
Brandon Smith: For all battery technology, all roads lead to China. And it’s not because they’re cheap. As a country, China invested in battery technology well before the rest of the world noticed it was going to be a key part of the revolution. Companies like CATL and BYD would absolutely dominate the U.S. auto industry if we let them into our market, because of how cheaply and how well they build batteries. All supply chains for good battery chemistries have some route to China because they’ve built a hold on that market. ZincFive is working on diversifying globally so that we can build batteries worldwide.
Nabeel Mahmood: You mentioned all roads lead to China — China was actually known for the Silk Road. So all roads do lead to China. It’s the battery Silk Road these days.
David Snow: I think the Silk Road was a lot faster than some of these data center projects, according to the frontline reporting. Maybe this is an unsophisticated question, but if there’s a $1 billion data center project and a $50 billion one, are you providing 50 times the batteries to the second project?
Brandon Smith: Yes, the short answer is yes. There’s a rough figure of $12 million per megawatt to build power, and a portion of that is UPS and batteries. The UPS is the component that takes the utility power and leverages the battery when the power goes out. The more power you build, the more batteries you have to have — as long as you want that coverage so you don’t drop the load. And if you drop the load, how do you watch Cool Vector?
David Snow: Final question for both of you: what is an observation or comment you hear quite a bit about batteries that you think is incorrect?
Nabeel Mahmood: I’ve walked through hundreds of thousands of square feet of data centers around the world, and half the time people didn’t even know they had a battery room — forget about servicing it. Now they’re talking about total energy storage capacity, what’s available, and whether it can guarantee the uptime they’re committing to their customers. We now have battery management systems and can access data on a real-time basis. The industry has changed significantly over the last couple of years.
Brandon Smith: There’s still a lot of education going on about what nickel zinc is, where it fits in the data center, and why it’s the right chemistry for the application. It used to be: take a battery, design it for the system, put it in. But there is a right-sizing to be done. When you right-size a system, you save money, you save footprint, and you leverage the power density of that product. Really until ZincFive and our battery cabinet solution, customers didn’t have that option. Whenever I get a ChatGPT response back extra quick, I’m going to send you a thank-you note.
David Snow: That’s right — batteries. It’s been great to talk to Brandon Smith of ZincFive and Nabeel Mahmood, editorial advisor to Cool Vector, ambassador to ZincFive, and co-founder of the Nomad Futurist nonprofit. Guys, thanks so much for joining Cool Vector today. I can’t wait to have another conversation with you.
