100 Gigawatts Hiding in Plain Sight: Emerald AI Raises $150M Series A

Today, Emerald AI announced an oversubscribed $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, bringing total funding to more than $200 million. This marks Earthshot's third investment in Emerald, after initially investing in its Seed round last year. The round will help Emerald execute at commercial scale and cement its position as the world's first natively power-flexible AI cloud.

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Power has become a major bottleneck limiting the pace of AI deployment. For large U.S. data centers requiring major grid upgrades, securing power can take a decade. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency reports that data centers drove half of U.S. electricity demand growth last year and expects them to account for about half of it through 2030. Every gigawatt waiting on the grid is compute that cannot come online, while every rushed megawatt of new supply risks landing on someone's utility bill.

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What Emerald AI Does‍

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Most data centers are rigid consumers of electricity. They draw power when they need it, and utilities must build and plan around their peak demand. Emerald's software turns them into grid-responsive assets. GridLink reads real-time grid conditions and signals from utilities, while the Emerald Conductor platform orchestrates AI workloads and onsite energy resources in response, throttling power use at the software level when the grid is stressed while protecting the performance of critical jobs.

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The payoff is massive. Researchers at Duke University's Nicholas Institute found that the U.S. could integrate nearly 100 gigawatts of new load using today's grid if those facilities curtailed their power use for roughly 0.5% of the year. That capacity could become available years before new infrastructure can be built, without requiring new fossil generation.

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The Last Twelve Months

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Since our seed investment, Emerald has moved from thesis to proof, and from demonstration to commercial scale.

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→ Five global demonstrations complete, establishing that commercial scale loads can be cut by 40% with no performance loss.

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→ A new path to grid access. With Silicon Valley Power, Emerald launched a Flexible Load Interconnection Program granting data centers expanded grid access in exchange for verified, dispatchable flexibility. This is the regulatory precedent the category needs.

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→ The world's first power-flexible AI factory. In Manassas, Virginia, Emerald is working with Digital Realty and NVIDIA to bring the nearly 100 MW Vera Rubin AI Research Factory online this year, with testing alongside EPRI, Dominion, and PJM.

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→ Recognition to match. Emerald was named to the TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2026 and selected as a 2026 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

‍Why We Invested

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→ The fastest path to power. As the Silicon Valley Power interconnection program attests, software-based load flexibility can become the quickest way to bring data centers online.

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→ Founder-market fit. Varun Sivaram has worked across energy development, technology, and government. He hit the interconnection wall himself as a developer and started Emerald to break it. The solution requires coordination among grid operators, utilities, data center owners, and AI companies, and few founders can expertly operate across all four like Varun.

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→ Incentive alignment. Utilities want load growth, data centers want power, regulators want reliability, and AI companies want compute. Emerald serves all four, and once its software is embedded in a facility's power stack, it is very hard to rip out.

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Minerals → Power → Compute → Intelligence → Climate Impact. Repeat.

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Earthshot backs the physical foundation of the AI era: the minerals, power, and efficient computing that make intelligence possible. Emerald complements Etched, KoBold Metals, and Mariana Minerals in a portfolio built around the conviction that the AI era will be won or lost in the physical world. KoBold and Mariana are building the critical-minerals supply chain; Etched is making computing more efficient; and Emerald is ensuring the grid can power it all. Together, they are building the physical foundation for clean intelligence, and putting that intelligence to work across the physical economy.

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Congratulations to Varun and the entire Emerald AI team on the raise!

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Matt & the Earthshot Team

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