Special Issue: Energy Sustainability With Computility–Electricity–Carbon Coordination

Data centers’ energy-intensive operations and associated carbon emissions pose critical threats to global energy sustainability, demanding a paradigm shift toward computility-electricity-carbon coordination. This special issue addresses the gap between conceptual frameworks and practical implementation, featuring 10 articles across three core themes to advance sustainable data center development. Firstly, three articles explore sustainable AI-power system interactions, where they propose tighter coupling of AI workloads with power grids via dynamic carbon signals, leverage foundation models as both energy consumers and optimization tools for grid control, and introduce “multiscale grid intelligence” to prevent AI data center grid defection. Secondly, four studies focus on data centers’ flexible operation, which present innovations include a workload migration framework, a hybrid load modeling approach merging physics and data-driven techniques, a multiphysics-informed AI framework, and a learning-augmented control method. Finally, three articles present decarbonization frameworks, including a computility-electricity-carbon coordination model, an energy-carbon-aware computing power sharing system, and U.S. decarbonization planning guidelines. These contributions highlight technology innovation and cross-domain collaboration, transforming data centers from passive loads to grid-responsive assets, and laying foundations for a low-carbon, sustainable energy future.