Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-27

A start-up that turns data centres down when the grid strains just raised $150 million — Nvidia, Siemens and GE Vernova all bought in

Emerald AI announced on 25 August that it had raised $150 million in an oversubscribed Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC. The investor list is the unusual part: Nvidia, Samsung Ventures, Siemens, GE Vernova, RWE, Aramco Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, JERA Ventures, In-Q-Tel and others — chipmakers, turbine builders and power companies on the same cap table. The company's software makes an AI data centre flex its electricity draw up and down in response to conditions on the grid, instead of pulling a flat maximum around the clock. It says it has completed five demonstrations at commercial data centres in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Oregon and London, working with Nvidia, EPRI, Oracle, Nebius and National Grid, and that the technique now runs commercially at multi-megawatt, whole-facility scale. Its central claim is that flexible data centres could free up more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing US grid.

Why it mattersEvery large AI announcement this year has ended at the same wall: there is not enough power, and new generation takes years. The bet here is that the shortage is partly a scheduling problem rather than a building problem — a data centre that can ease off for a few hours during a heatwave can be connected today, on wires that already exist. Whether 100 gigawatts is real depends on how often operators will actually accept slower training runs to keep the lights on elsewhere. That a chipmaker, a turbine manufacturer and a grid operator all wrote cheques suggests the industry is at least willing to find out.

✓ Verified · 2 sources

A start-up that turns data centres down when the grid strains just raised $150 million — Nvidia, Siemens and GE Vernova all bought in

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