05/05/2026
Emerald AI, the start-up company that was founded on the research of Prof. Dr. Ayşe Kıvılcım Coşkun (Sabancı University Alumna 2003), has joined the highly prestigious TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2026 list. Dr. Coşkun, who is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, also serves as the Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development at the College of Engineering. She is the Director of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering, has pioneered the field of flexible AI and high-performance computing to bolster the power grid.
Emerald AI has been built on the groundbreaking research of Dr. Coşkun to transform energy-intensive data centers into AI-powered grid allies. The Emerald AI Conductor platform enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand, orchestrating the computing loads of inference, training, and fine-tuning AI models across a network of data centers to bolster the power grid’s reliability while meeting strict compute performance standards.
The sixth annual TIME100 Most Influential Companies list revealed on 30 April 2026 is highlighting 100 companies making extraordinary impact around the world. To assemble the list, TIME solicited nominations across sectors, and polled its global network of editors and correspondents, as well as outside experts. The result is a diverse group of 100 businesses helping chart an essential path forward. The list includes renowned companies such as Boeing, Dell Technologies, Foxconn, Huawei, IBM, Netflix, Nvidia, SpaceX, and Toyota – in addition to successful start-ups like Emerald AI.
The startup uses software to shift electricity demand, orchestrating when and where AI workloads run based on grid conditions and the specific performance requirements. In March 2026, the company announced announced a partnership with NVIDIA to bring together top power companies to build AI facilities that can adjust to the challenges and needs of the power grid. Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, has said: “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. NVIDIA and Emerald AI are working together to enable a future for AI where performance, efficiency and grid responsiveness can be tapped into immediately.”
Sabancı University graduate (2003) Ayşe Kıvılcım Coşkun, is the Chief Scientist at Emerald AI. She is a full professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University, where she leads the Center for Information and Systems Engineering and serves as Associate Dean for Research at the College of Engineering.
Prof. Coşkun is widely recognized as a leading academic authority on orchestrating data center power demand in response to power grid needs. Her research group has published groundbreaking work in this area, helping shape the emerging field of flexible, grid-aware computing. Her broader research applies AI and machine learning to optimize cloud and high-performance computing systems. She has received numerous honors for her contributions, including the Ernest Kuh Award for energy-efficient system-level design and an IBM Faculty Award for applying AI-based methods in DevSecOps. Earlier in her career, Prof. Coşkun worked in industry at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Until recently she served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design and holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.
