Emerald AI Raises $150M Series A at $1.05B Valuation to Scale Power-Flexible Data Centers

Building new transmission infrastructure in the US takes a decade or more, and the International Energy Agency projects data centers will account for nearly half of US electricity demand growth through 2030. The grid can’t expand fast enough to match AI’s power appetite, so Emerald AI is betting on a different fix: turning data centers into flexible grid assets instead of building more transmission. The company has announced a $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, bringing Emerald AI’s total funding to more than $220 million.

Emerald AI’s software, Emerald Conductor, dynamically orchestrates a data center’s AI computing workloads and onsite energy resources — batteries, onsite generation — to flex power draw when the grid is under stress, while protecting the performance of critical workloads. The pitch is that data centers stop being a strain on the grid and become good grid citizens instead. Applied broadly, the company says the approach can unlock more than 100 gigawatts of untapped capacity on the existing US grid without building new infrastructure.

Over the past year, Emerald AI completed five commercial demonstrations — in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Oregon, and London — working with partners including NVIDIA, EPRI, Oracle, Nebius, and National Grid. It has since moved from demonstration to commercial scaling, deploying at a full data center in California that proved grid-responsive flexibility during peak grid strain. The company partnered with Silicon Valley Power on the first-in-the-nation Flexible Load Interconnection Program, which grants data centers expanded grid access in exchange for verified flexibility, and in Manassas, Virginia, it’s working with Digital Realty and NVIDIA to bring online the world’s first power-flexible AI factory — the nearly 100-megawatt Vera Rubin AI Research Factory, developed with EPRI, Dominion, and PJM Interconnection and expected online later this year.

Founder and CEO Dr. Varun Sivaram is a Rhodes and Truman Scholar with a PhD in condensed matter physics from Oxford. He previously served as Managing Director for Clean Energy at the US State Department, where he created the First Movers Coalition, and held chief strategy and technology roles at Danish energy firm Ørsted and India’s ReNew Power. He’s also the author of Taming the Sun, a book on the future of solar energy. “We founded Emerald AI on the conviction that the intelligence driving the AI revolution could solve its own greatest bottleneck: power,” Sivaram said.

Emerald AI was founded in November 2024 and raised a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures in July 2025, followed by a seed extension led by Lowercarbon Capital. This Series A drew participation from 12 Fortune Global 500 companies, including NVIDIA, Samsung Ventures, Siemens, Aramco Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, GE Vernova, and RWE — all of whom also sit on the company’s Strategic Advisory Board, working directly with Emerald AI on product integration and deployment. “The binding constraint on AI is no longer chips or capital; it is power, and software is the fastest way through it,” said John Tough, Managing Partner at Energize Capital. Zachary Bogue, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at DCVC, said the platform “makes flexibility a permanent feature of how data centers are powered.” The funding will go toward scaling commercial deployments worldwide.

Companies are attacking the power bottleneck from different angles. Stanford spinoff GridCARE raised $64 million to manage grid-to-data-center interconnection with software, similar to Emerald AI, while XLR8 and VoltaGrid bypass the grid entirely with onsite generation, raising $1.75 billion and $1 billion respectively. Google took a third approach, acquiring Intersect Power for $4.75 billion last December to own power assets directly.