NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Emerald AI announced a collaboration with six major energy companies to develop AI factories that can connect to power grids faster and operate as flexible energy assets.

The partnership includes AES, Constellation, Invenergy, NextEra Energy, Nscale Energy & Power, and Vistra. The companies plan to build AI factories using NVIDIA's new Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design, which includes DSX Flex software for connecting AI facilities to power grid services.

The AI factories are designed to use co-located energy generation and storage as bridge power, then later supply electricity back to the grid. This approach aims to bring AI capacity online faster while creating value for broader power systems.

Emerald AI's Conductor platform will coordinate computational flexibility with onsite generation and batteries to deliver grid-responsive power while maintaining service quality for AI compute operations.

"AI factories are the engines of the intelligence era, and like any great engine, every system must be designed together — energy, compute, networking and cooling as one architecture," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO.

The companies stated that power-flexible AI factories could help unlock up to 100 gigawatts of capacity across the U.S. power system by optimizing infrastructure design and existing assets.

Over the past year, Emerald AI and NVIDIA conducted AI power flexibility demonstrations at five commercial data centers globally. DSX Flex is expected to be deployed commercially later this year at the NVIDIA AI Factory Research Center in Virginia.

The announcement was made at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston. The companies plan to identify project opportunities using the Vera Rubin DSX reference design to accelerate large-scale AI infrastructure deployment and support faster grid interconnections.