- Emerald AI has raised $150 million in its oversubscribed Series A financing, bringing its valuation to $1.05 billion.
- The software enables AI data centres to act as flexible assets for the power grid rather than merely serving as constant power users, and has now moved from demonstrations into commercial deployment.
- Varun Sivaram founded the company in 2024, having previously held a senior climate position in the Biden administration.
Emerald AI, a Washington, D.C.-based startup that helps AI data centres reduce or shift their power consumption when the grid is under stress, has raised $150 million in its oversubscribed Series A round at a $1.05 billion valuation.
Energize Capital and DCVC jointly led the round, with several financial and strategic investors also participating. The company now has 12 Fortune Global 500 companies among its investors, all of which sit on its Strategic Advisory Board. Its total funding thus exceeds $220 million, less than a year after it exited stealth.
The round also included Nvidia, Samsung Ventures, Siemens, Aramco Ventures, RWE, JERA Ventures, ADVentures, Sabanci Climate Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Lowercarbon Capital, Marunouchi Innovation Partners, Emerson Collective, the Olayan Group, the Temerty Group, John Doerr, Tom Steyer, Earthshot Ventures, Collective Global, and General Catalyst’s scout fund.
“We founded Emerald AI on the conviction that the intelligence driving the AI revolution could solve its own greatest bottleneck: power. Our demonstrations around the world proved that data centers can adjust their power use precisely when the grid needs relief, without compromising critical computing workloads. Today that technology runs commercially at full data centre scale, and this financing lets us take it everywhere AI is built,” Varun Sivaram, founder and CEO of Emerald AI, said.
Over the past year, investor interest in AI infrastructure startups has increased as technology companies have expanded their data centre capacity, which in turn has led to higher valuations and accelerated funding for companies addressing issues such as power availability.
Morgan Stanley expects global electricity demand to rise by over 1 trillion kWh each year by 2030, with data centres accounting for nearly 20% of that increase, according to the firm’s energy market outlook. Emerald AI’s own figures, drawn from the International Energy Agency, put data centres at nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth through 2030.
From climate diplomacy to grid software
Sivaram founded the company in November 2024, having gained relevant experience from outside the startup sector. He is a Rhodes Scholar who holds a doctorate in solar physics and has served as chief strategy and innovation officer at Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind company, and as chief technology officer at ReNew Power, India’s largest renewable energy company.
He previously held the position of managing director for clean energy and, at the same time, served as a senior advisor to climate envoy John Kerry in the first two years of the Biden administration, during which time he helped found the First Movers Coalition.
The Emerald Conductor software, developed by the company, connects its data centres to utilities and grid operators and automatically adjusts the amount of power used by AI clusters in response to grid requirements, while still ensuring that the promised performance levels are met.
In a field test published in Nature Energy, the software reduced the power consumption of a commercial cluster equipped with 256 GPUs by 25% over a three-hour period while the power grid was under strain in Phoenix, without compromising performance guarantees.
Over the past year, Emerald AI has completed five demonstrations at commercial data centres in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Oregon, and London, in partnership with Nvidia, EPRI, Oracle, Nebius, and National Grid. It has since moved into commercial scaling, deploying across an entire data centre in California, where it sustained grid-responsive power flexibility during peak grid strain.
The company’s partnership with Silicon Valley Power launched what it calls the first-in-the-nation Flexible Load Interconnection Program, granting data centres expanded grid access in exchange for verified, dispatchable flexibility.
In Manassas, Virginia, it is working with Digital Realty and Nvidia to bring online the nearly 100-megawatt Vera Rubin AI Research Factory, which has been tested with EPRI, Dominion, and the PJM Interconnection and is expected to be online later this year.
Focusing on demand-side flexibility instead of new power supply
While most companies are taking a different approach from Emerald AI, Verse, for instance, raised $54 million to accelerate the deployment of data centre facilities alongside on-site batteries, and Last Energy raised $100 million to construct small nuclear reactors as a power source for data centres.
Ireland’s GridBeyond, on the other hand, is closer to Emerald AI’s model in that it uses software to manage flexible demand across grids rather than building new power sources.
Instead of considering the power supply as the flexible resource, Emerald AI’s approach is more focused and tailored to AI, treating the computing power within a data centre as the flexible asset.
What comes next
The company states that it will put the new funds towards expanding its commercial operations worldwide, and that its customer base consists of AI companies, data centre operators and electric utilities.
“The binding constraint on AI is no longer chips or capital; it is power, and software is the fastest way through it. Emerald AI has converted world-class research into commercial deployments faster than any company we have seen in this category,” said John Tough, managing partner at Energize Capital.
“Emerald AI’s compute workload orchestration platform makes flexibility a permanent feature of how data centers are powered. This turns data centers into grid-responsive assets instead of energy-hogging liabilities,” added Zachary Bogue, co-founder and managing partner at DCVC.
Emerald AI was recently named one of the 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Companies and a 2026 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
