Two-year-old startup Emerald AI has raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation, the company announced August 25. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC and includes 12 Fortune Global 500 companies as investors, taking total funding above $220 million.
Software That Slows AI Workloads When The Grid Bites
Emerald AI's Emerald Conductor platform sorts computing jobs by the delay each customer will tolerate, then slows, pauses, caps or shifts jobs when a utility signals that the grid is stressed. That target — the workload itself rather than the cooling gear — makes data centers behave like flexible grid assets instead of inflexible base loads. The company argues that applied across the AI build-out, the approach could unlock more than 100 gigawatts of untapped capacity on the existing U.S. grid, power that would arrive years before new generation and transmission can be built.
Founder and Chief Executive Dr. Varun Sivaram, a former Biden administration climate official, said the firm was built on "the conviction that the intelligence driving the AI revolution could solve its own greatest bottleneck: power."
Nvidia, Samsung Ventures, Siemens And RWE In The Cap Table
Beyond Energize Capital and DCVC, the round drew NVIDIA, Samsung Ventures, Siemens, Aramco Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, GE Vernova, RWE, JERA Ventures, ADVentures, Sabanci Climate Ventures, the CIA-linked In-Q-Tel, Radical Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Lowercarbon Capital and Emerson Collective. John Doerr, Tom Steyer and Google's Jeff Dean were among the individual backers.
Five Demonstrations, Full-Site Deployments Next
Emerald has run five commercial demonstrations in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Oregon and London alongside NVIDIA, Oracle, Nebius, EPRI and National Grid. In Phoenix, Emerald cut the power draw of a 256-GPU NVIDIA cluster by 25% for three hours across 33 experiments without breaking a service tier. In Manassas, Virginia, the company is now working with NVIDIA and Digital Realty on what it calls the world's first power-flexible AI factory, the roughly 100 MW Vera Rubin AI Research Factory tested with EPRI, Dominion and PJM Interconnection.
The round comes as U.S. utilities warn that new grid capacity is largely spoken for and data centers are forecast to drive nearly half the growth in U.S. electricity demand through 2030. It also lands alongside a wider wave of AI power deals including Anthropic's Theseus infrastructure vehicle and NVIDIA's Cloverleaf backing. Emerald was named one of the 2026 TIME 100 Most Influential Companies and a 2026 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
Reporting based on coverage from BusinessWire, TNW, Reuters and The New York Times.