Energy-Aware Agentic Orchestration for Multi-Site Service Deployment

Abstract

Energy-aware orchestration across geographically distributed infrastructures is increasingly important as data centers absorb growing Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads. However, existing approaches often exclude the energy cost of automated decision-making from system-level sustainability assessments. This paper presents an energy-aware agentic orchestration framework that treats Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning as a measurable component of the control loop. We compare single-shot tool calling, ReAct, and plan-and-execute strategies on a multi-site Kubernetes testbed spanning two European data centers and instrumented at layers ranging from power distribution units to per-pod energy attribution. Using ten natural-language orchestration intents with varying decision complexity, we show that reasoning strategy and intent complexity strongly influence graphics processing unit (GPU) energy consumption during orchestration decisions. ReAct and plan-and-execute generated executable tool calls across all evaluated intents but required multiple LLM inferences, whereas the single-shot configuration was less costly but non-actionable. Prefix caching reduced mean ReAct GPU energy consumption by 29.4%. For the evaluated lightweight workload, the infrastructure-energy changes observed within the one-second measurement window were insufficient to offset the measured GPU decision energy. These findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for reasoning overhead when assessing the sustainability of AI-native orchestration and motivate energy-budgeted selection of agent strategies.