Smoothing the Ramp, Not the Peak: Scheduling-Induced Power Dynamics of LLM Inference and Their Grid-Scale Consequences
Large language model (LLM) inference serving is a fast-growing electricity load whose power dynamics remain uncharacterized from a grid-planning perspective. Using real, measured GPU power traces, we show that chunked prefill scheduling, a latency-motivated technique already deployed by default in production LLM serving, is a controllable knob that regulates power ramp rate without touching peak power. Contrary to the intuitive hypothesis that splitting a long prompt's computation into smaller steps should flatten its power spike, peak power stays relatively the same while mean ramp rate falls substantially. Critically, this ramp-rate benefit is not a fixed property of the policy: it grows monotonically with system saturation, and we confirm this along two independent axes: concurrency (7.0% at light load to 34.6% at heavy load, mean-ramp reduction) and long-prompt ("whale") request load (from statistically flat at low whale incidence to 42.6% at high whale fraction/size). We translate this single-GPU mechanism into an operational grid quantity, regulation-reserve procurement, posed and solved as a chance-constrained problem using a model-free bootstrap directly resampling real measured power traces. At a representative operating point, this translates to an estimated 20.3-22.7% reduction in the fast-ramping reserve capacity a grid operator would need to provision, across reliability levels from 95% to 99.9%. Together, these results give grid operators a no-cost demand-shaping tool available today, whose benefit is largest precisely when data centers run hottest and grid stress is most salient.