PhD Stipend in Energy-Efficient Agentic AI: Measuring When AI Is Worth Its Energy

At the Technical Faculty of IT and Design, the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University invites applications for a PhD stipend on measuring and reducing the energy cost of agentic AI. The stipend is open for appointment from 1 March 2027 or soon hereafter. The duration of the position is three years.

The position is part of the project Energy, Sovereignty and the Responsible Use of Agentic AI, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) under its thematic programme on artificial intelligence. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and Aalborg University Business School. A second PhD student, recruited at the Business School, studies how organisations decide on, govern and maintain their use of AI; the two PhD students are trained together as a paired cohort.

Your work tasks

Every call to a large language model spends energy, and an AI agent calls a model many times to finish a single task: it plans, uses tools, retries and checks its own results. Early measurements suggest that agentic coding uses on the order of 1000 times more tokens than ordinary chat, and that much of the energy goes into failed and retried steps. As organisations move from chat to agents, AI becomes a recurring operational cost per task rather than a fixed background cost.

The project Energy, Sovereignty and the Responsible Use of Agentic AI asks when the use of AI is worth its energy cost, and who is able to judge this. The PhD stipend covers the engineering side of the project. You will build the evidence base: how much energy agentic AI actually spends per successfully completed task, and under which conditions cheaper alternatives do the same job.

A central comparison is between calling an agent every time a task recurs and having AI generate conventional, deterministic software once. Generated software costs energy to produce but almost nothing to run; an agent invocation costs the same every time. The project seeks to measure the break-even point between the two, and how it depends on the model, the framework and the stability of the task.

Within this frame, you develop your own PhD project. Indicative questions include:

• How much energy do LLM and agentic-coding workloads consume per successful task, for frontier models and for small, open-weight models, and how is that energy split between planning, retries and failed steps?
• When is it energy-rational to call a model or agent at runtime, and when is it better to generate a deterministic program once? Where does the break-even lie in practice?
• How different DevOps practices benefit or penalize the energy cost of running the agents?
• How much do levers such as prompt caching, model cascades, small-model routing and distillation reduce energy per successful task, and at what cost in quality?
• How can the energy use of models accessed only through an API be estimated reliably, and validated against direct measurements on local hardware?
• How do changes in providers' models affect the energy cost and the stability of AI-based systems over time, and how portable are agent setups across providers?

The work is experimental. You will run agent frameworks on curated task sets, and measure energy directly on hardware (for example Intel RAPL, performance counters and rack-level power meters) for locally run models. For frontier models you will develop and validate telemetry- and FLOP-based estimates. You will have access to the energy-measurement testbeds and tooling developed in the ITEA4 projects GreenCode and MAST, on-premise GPU/CPU infrastructure, and AAU's CLAAUDIA cloud and HPC services.

The PhD project is carried out in close collaboration with the social-science researchers at the Business School. Your measurements inform their study of how organisations decide on, procure and maintain AI, and their findings help frame which comparisons matter. You will take part in shared project seminars, undertake a short secondment into the organisational work package, and contribute to pilots with Danish public and private organisations, drawing on the GreenCode and MAST industrial partners.

The project follows open-science practice: protocols are pre-registered, null and negative results are reported, and the measurement harness and benchmarks are released as open source and contributed to community efforts such as the Hugging Face AI Energy Score.

As a PhD student you will complete PhD courses, gain experience with teaching or other forms of knowledge dissemination, and take part in the research environment at the Department of Computer Science. You will publish your research at international venues in software engineering and sustainable computing, such as HotCarbon, ICSE, FSE, MSR, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Empirical Software Engineering.

Your competencies

You hold a Master's degree in computer science or software engineering, or a related field.

We are looking for a candidate with a strong interest in the efficiency and sustainability of computing systems, who enjoys designing careful experiments and wants to find out what AI systems actually cost when they run. You should also be curious about how organisations use AI, and willing to work closely with social scientists. We are particularly interested in candidates who can formulate a clear, original and feasible research problem, and present a realistic plan for the experiments needed to address it.

Solid programming skills (for example Python) and experience with Linux-based systems are expected. Experience with one or more of the following is an advantage: LLMs and agent frameworks, energy or performance measurement, benchmarking, empirical software engineering, distributed or embedded systems, and GPU or HPC environments. You communicate clearly in English. Danish is not a requirement. Read more here:

Qualification requirements
PhD stipends are allocated to individuals who hold a Master's degree. PhD stipends are normally for a period of 3 years. It is a prerequisite for allocation of the stipend that the candidate will be enrolled as a PhD student at  the Technical Doctoral School of IT and Design in accordance with the regulations of Ministerial Order No. 872 of 6 October 2026 on the PhD Programme at the Universities and Certain Higher Artistic Educational Institutions. According to the Ministerial Order, the progress of the PhD student shall be assessed at regular points in time. As part of the PhD study, you are among other things required to complete PhD courses corresponding to 30 ECTS, gain experience with teaching or other forms of knowledge dissemination and complete an external research stay outside of Aalborg University, preferably 3-6 months at a foreign research institution.

Who we are    

The PhD student will be affiliated with the Distributed Sustainable Software and Systems (DSSS) research group of the Distributed, Embedded and Intelligent Systems (DEIS) section of the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, and supervised by Associate Professor Michele Albano, with Associate Professor Roman Jurowetzki (AAU Business School) as co-supervisor on the responsible-use side of the project. The group works on energy-efficient distributed and embedded software and systems, and coordinates research and industrial collaboration in the ITEA4 consortia GreenCode (21 international partners) and MAST (8 international partners). In the start-up phase the PhD student will also work with a postdoctoral researcher with experience in agentic software development.

In Computer Science, Aalborg University is known worldwide for its high academic quality and societal impact. The Department of Computer Science employs more than 170 people, of which about 53 are PhD students, and about 47% of all employees are internationals. In total, it has more than 1200 students in its BSc and MSc programs, which are based on AAU's problem-based learning model. The department leverages its unique research infrastructure and lab facilities to conduct world-leading fundamental and applied research within sustainable computing, verification and model checking, embedded and cyber-physical systems, data intensive systems, AI, planning, networks, programming theory, and security. Applications span areas such as energy, transport, health and water. The department plays an active role in transferring inventions and results into applications in close collaboration with industrial partners worldwide. The Department of Computer Science is located at Selma Lagerløfs Vej in Aalborg. Within this project, the group works with the Innovation, Knowledge and Economic Dynamics (IKE) group at Aalborg University Business School and its part in the National Centre for AI in Society (CAISA).

How to apply
Your application must include the following:

• Application, stating reasons for applying and qualifications in relation to the position
• Curriculum Vitae (CV)
• Diplomas (bachelor's and master's degree diploma, including grades) 
•  Project description
• Applicants are required to submit, along with their application documents, a one-page statement, indicating their vision for research to be conducted in relation to the project topics outlined above 
• List of written work (optional)
• Two references informing about the applicant's personality and professional capabilities (optional)
• Applicants who do not have English as a first language and who have not completed an English language-based Master's programme (or an equivalent educational achievement in English) shall provide documentation that they have passed one of the following official tests with the respective minimum score: IELTS (band score): 7, TOEFL (paper-based): 600, TOEFL (internet-based): 100. The language test must be no more than five years old at the time of the application.
• Other relevant documents

The application must be submitted via Aalborg University’s recruitment system, which can be accessed under the job advertisement on Aalborg University's website. 

Aalborg University wants to reflect the surrounding society and has diversity as a core value. Therefore, everyone, regardless of personal background and orientation, is encouraged to apply for the position.

Do you have any questions?     
If you have any questions about the position, you are more than welcome to contact us. You will find contact persons at the bottom of the jobpost.
Further information  
Read more about our recruitment process here.

The assessment of candidates for the position will be carried out by qualified experts.
Shortlisting will be applied. This means that after the application deadline, the head of the department, with the assistance of the hiring committee, will select the applicants to be assessed. All applicants will be informed whether they have been shortlisted for assessment or not.

The hiring process at Aalborg University may include a risk assessment as a tool to identify potential risks associated with new hires, ensuring the safety, compliance, and integrity of the workplace.

Read more about The Technical Doctoral School of IT and Design

Salary and terms of employment
The employment is in accordance with the Ministerial Order on the Appointment of Academic Staff at Universities and the Ministerial Order on Job Structure for Academic Staff at Universities. Furthermore, your terms of employment and salary are in accordance with the collective agreement between the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations and the state (AC collective agreement). 

You can find information about the salary and salary structure for the position in the Salary Overview for Recruitment - Scientific positions (VIP). Please refer to the introductory section of the page and the section entitled “PhD Fellow”.

There is a mutual probationary period of 3 months for the position.

Aalborg University - Knowledge for the world
Aalborg University is an international workplace with more than 3,700 employees. We offer real-world-oriented education and create world-class research results through collaboration between researchers, students, and public and private companies. This is how we achieve insights, new solutions to societal problems, and knowledge that changes the world. Our main campus is in Aalborg, but we also have campuses in Esbjerg and Copenhagen.

Contacts

• Associate Professor Michele Albano: mialb@cs.aau.dk

Employment type

Full time

Ref number

2026/1289

Deadline

05.12.2026