AI data centres already strain the grid just by running. A new paper asks a darker question: what if a tenant tried to break it on purpose?
Three researchers at Zhejiang University set out the idea in a preprint called Bit2Watt, accepted to a leading hardware-security conference. As The Register reported, it imagines a paying customer as the attacker.
How it works
The trick rests on a simple fact. A GPU’s power draw follows whatever it is computing. Load it hard and the current spikes. Let it idle and the current drops.
Flip between those states on a schedule and you get a controllable power wobble at the wall socket. The researchers pushed it past 6,000 times a second, far faster than the gentle sway of a household load like an air conditioner.
