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Making room in a data center

Google DeepMind reported that an AlphaEvolve-discovered scheduling heuristic had been in production for more than a year and continuously recovered an average 0.7% of Google's worldwide compute resources.

Maturity
Deployed, stage 4 of 4
Support
1 source · institution
Scale
○ ≈ 1 km · a data-center campus
Evidence detail
How we know ↓
A long row of supercomputer cabinets with perforated doors receding across a tiled floor.
An AI-found rule frees 0.7% of Google’s computing — continuously.Context NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, Ames Research Center, 2008. Not Google’s data centers. NASA Ames Research Center (ARC-2008-ACD08-0272-003, cropped), U.S. government work.

Data-center capacity is finite, and idle or poorly allocated compute leaves less capacity for useful work on the same infrastructure.

A production scheduler must make dependable allocation decisions across changing workloads at very large scale.

AlphaEvolve used language models, automated evaluation, and evolutionary search to produce a scheduling heuristic for Google's Borg system.

What was shown, and what wasn’t

Shown

Google says the production heuristic continuously recovers, on average, 0.7% of its worldwide compute resources.

Not shown · limits

  • This is a company-reported, Google-specific operational result.
  • The announcement does not quantify electricity, water, carbon, reliability, or independent-audit outcomes.

Bright editorial interpretation

Recovering capacity can allow more tasks to run on an existing computational footprint.

Still open

Would the heuristic transfer to other scheduler designs?

What are the measured energy and reliability effects under representative workloads?

How we know1 source · checked 2026-09-07 · no corrections

Original sources

  1. AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms ↗ · institution

Institutions: Google DeepMind · Google

Maturity
Deployed
Source published
2025-05-14
Captured
2026-09-07
Last source review
2026-09-07
Editorial method
AI-assisted source review

Bright compared this account with the linked original and supporting sources and kept reported, budgeted, projected, and observed claims distinct. Bright did not independently audit the underlying records.

Maturity describes the tested or operational setting. Confidence describes support for the particular claim; one does not determine the other.

Revision & correction history

2026-09-07 · Recovering capacity can allow more tasks to run on an existing computational footprint.

No corrections recorded.

Keep exploring

Explore the shared question in another setting. These connections do not imply replication.

An editorial connection recorded in Bright’s evidence catalog.New paths through mathematics. ↗QuestionCan intelligence help make energy more abundant, reliable and responsible? ↗QuestionWhen does a technical result become a public capability? ↗Related development · not a replicationNew paths through mathematics. ↗

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