DARPA bets on ‘energy calculus’ to tame AI’s power appetite

The Pentagon's research agency is funding university teams to cut and predict how much electricity machine learning consumes DARPA is spending real money on a problem most AI companies would rather not discuss: their models eat electricity at an alarming rate. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has backed a $1.83 million project, led by the University of Michigan, that aims to build a mathematical toolkit for squeezing waste out of every stage of AI. The research team believes the approach could potentially cut energy use by as much as 50%. What DARPA is actually paying for The flagship effort is called E-CALC. Its partners include the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and defense contractor BAE Systems, and the award was announced in late October 2026. The core idea is something the team calls “energy calculus.” The framework is meant to track and optimize power consumption across the full AI lifecycle. That covers data processing, model training and eventual deployment. A second award points in a related direction. Stony Brook University, working with Ohio State University, received $1 million from DARPA on October 20, 2026, under a separate initiative known as t...