Anthropic’s off-peak Claude promotion is smart for their servers — but it could mean more AI compute when the grid is most stressed.
Anthropic is trialling double Claude usage outside of peak Claude time (8 am to 2 pm ET), or 10 pm to 4 am AEST, for 2 weeks — pretty handy for us Aussie users. This is likely motivated by reducing their server demand during peak usage hours, but counterintuitively, it could lead to more demand at peak electricity times when the grid is already most stressed.
Why are they doing this
Anthropic hasn’t explicitly said why, but the timing is telling. Claude went down on the 2nd of March1 due to “unprecedented demand” — partly driven by a surge in sign ups after ChatGPT’s outage on the 27th of February.2 There was another significant Claude outage on March 11 — just two days before this promotion launched.
If Anthropic can shift user load away from US business hours, they get the same total usage for less server cost. The marginal cost of running a GPU outside peak time is low, so encouraging more usage then is a straightforward win — much like the benefits of electricity load shifting for better network utilisation.
There’s also an IPO angle. As one Hacker News commenter said: “Maybe it’s a little bit of [hardware utilisation], and a bit of boosting monthly average users and token average usage. Anthropic should be IPOing this year and higher usage stats I’m sure will help.”
Does the peak window actually match usage?
Claude has users globally, so why was US-peak time specifically chosen? Most Claude inference is done in the US — Anthropic hasn’t disclosed exact figures, but the US accounts for 22% of Claude.ai usage, far ahead of the next closest countries, India (5.8%) and Japan/South Korea (3.1% each), according to the Anthropic Economic Index. Most inference likely runs on US-based hardware, given Anthropic’s cloud partnerships with AWS and Google Cloud, though regional processing launched in mid-2025.
Per capita Claude usage by country (Anthropic Economic Index).
I wanted to see whether the promotion’s peak window lines up with actual internet activity, so I pulled global HTTP traffic data from the Cloudflare Radar API. Cloudflare’s traffic is disproportionately US-based,3 which is a flaw for measuring “global” internet usage — but since Claude usage is also US-dominated, the bias very roughly cancels out for this purpose.4 The usage peak lines up well with the promotion’s peak window.
Source: Cloudflare Radar API, 7-day average (human traffic only, bot-filtered), hourly resolution. Normalized 0–1 where 1 = peak hour. Converted from UTC to ET.
But what about the electricity grid?
Anthropic is optimising for IT infrastructure peak, not electricity peak. Because of solar generation throughout the day, the main peak for grid-drawn electricity is typically in the evening — when everyone comes home, turns on the air conditioning, and cooks dinner. This gives rise to the famous duck-shaped net load profile: demand after subtracting variable renewable generation plunges during sunny midday hours and surges in the late afternoon.
Demand curve after subtracting variable renewable generation for the lowest net load spring day in CAISO, leading to the characteristic duck curve (EIA).5
This kind of incentive for demand shifting could become increasingly relevant as model inference uses more hardware and electricity, and the number of users increases. Perhaps in the future as we see more local inference in different countries we may see country- or timezone-specific peak/off-peak incentives.
Currently, Anthropic is likely just optimising for IT infrastructure peak rather than electricity peak, but there’s no reason they couldn’t do it for both peaks (e.g., double usage outside of 8 am to 2 pm and ~7 pm to 10 pm local time).
Illustrative grid-aware peak restriction alongside existing peak restriction. Sources: Cloudflare Radar API (Mar 2026, 7-day avg, human traffic, bot-filtered). Net load curve: indicative duck curve shape based on CAISO 2023 spring low day (EIA), plotted in ET for illustrative purposes. Net load = demand minus variable renewable generation.
Note: this is purely illustrative. I’ve taken the lowest net load day from California’s CAISO market (which has a more pronounced duck curve than the US east coast) in spring 2023. The actual impact depends on the local demand curve wherever Anthropic’s data centres (or their cloud servers) are located.
This is probably the key takeaway for this post: Counterproductively, the double usage for Claude outside of peak datacentre usage could lead to more grid demand at the peak electricity times when the grid is already most stressed. If we’re optimising for minimising grid impacts, we’d actually want more usage during daylight hours, not less. That way we soak up excess solar while minimising peaker usage (such as gas turbines).
Demand shifting is everywhere
This isn’t the first example of demand shifting by an LLM provider. DeepSeek offered 75% (for R1) or 50% (for V3) API discounts during off-peak hours (16:30–00:30 UTC). But this kind of incentive could become increasingly relevant as AI workloads scale.
Encouraging load shifting in electricity use is a tale almost as old as time. Time-of-use tariffs are used to incentivise more or less load at certain times of day. Australia’s Solar Sharer initiative will make electricity free (up to a cap) for 3 daylight hours for those on certain plans.
Outside of the energy world, demand shifting signals can be seen in telecommunications (peak and off-peak internet speeds), public transport (cheaper fares outside of peak time), airlines (dynamic pricing by time of day and season), and ride sharing (Uber surge pricing). It’s an efficient signal to spread demand across the day, week, and year.
As AI workloads grow and their grid impact becomes harder to ignore, aligning compute incentives with electricity system needs may become not just sensible but necessary.
- The outage peaked at 6:40 a.m. ET. ↩︎
- Who among us hasn’t fired up ChatGPT after using up our daily Claude usage? ↩︎
- Cloudflare is used by 20.4% of all websites, and the US accounts for 47.6% of Cloudflare websites. ↩︎
- I’d welcome suggestions for better data sources. ↩︎
- Note that the duck curve is typically depicted differently in Australia, where it only subtracts household self-consumption rather than all variable renewables. ↩︎