Data center power startup Emerald AI raises $150M at $1.05B valuation
Data center power startup Emerald AI Inc. today said that it had raised $150 million in new funding in an oversubscribed round at a valuation of $1.05 billion. Emerald will put the money into scaling commercial deployments worldwide.
The company’s core product, called Emerald Conductor, is software that schedules artificial intelligence workloads against the batteries and generation available onsite. Power draw at the facility comes down when the local system is stressed, and critical training and inference jobs keep running. The utility, in effect, gets a site it can dispatch like a generator.
New transmission needs a decade of permitting and construction, and AI data centers are not waiting. The International Energy Agency expects the sector to drive nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth through 2030. Emerald estimates that flexible operation could unlock more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing U.S. system, years before new construction could deliver it.
Emerald spent the past year running five demonstrations on live commercial load, at sites in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Oregon and London. Partners included Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp. and National Grid plc, plus regional utilities and grid operators.
