(Bloomberg) — A startup working to unlock excess power grid capacity for data centers raised $64 million as utilities and hyperscalers race to ease an energy crunch constraining the build-out of artificial intelligence.
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GridCARE lined up financing in a Series A round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, an original investor in Nvidia Corp., and with backing from venture capitalist John Doerr, bringing its total funding to $77.5 million. The company uses AI to analyze the power grid across millions of scenarios, identifying underused capacity that can connect large loads like data centers faster than waiting for new plants or transmission lines to be built.
Utilities and data centers are seeking enough power to meet rising demand as gigawatt-sized projects put pressure on grids and electricity costs. The strain has left utilities, regulators and policymakers increasingly at odds over how to manage it.
“The frenzy is so out of hand right now that people think sending chips to space might be faster than finding power on Earth,” said Amit Narayan, GridCARE’s co-founder and chief executive officer, adding that the situation doesn’t need to be so dire.
Research from Stanford University shows that only about one third of the grid is used most of the time. But large data-center loads can constrain grids during stretches of peak electric use, including during extreme weather.
GridCARE’s AI software analyzes the grid in real time and over the long term to help utilities balance demand for those peak moments while connecting data centers more quickly, Narayan said. That could involve evaluating how many hours a utility should be able to interrupt a data center’s power in order to protect the rest of the grid.
“It’s a matter of making sure that when this extra power is quote-unquote unlocked,” it’s done with “the full understanding of the tolerance that needs to be dealt with so that nobody is compromised,” said Ram Shriram, board member and a seed investor in GridCARE, who is also a board member and early investor in Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
GridCARE is working with Portland General Electric Co. on a plan to unlock as much as 400 megawatts of excess grid capacity in Hillsboro, Oregon, by 2029. A megawatt is a unit of electricity equal to one million watts, roughly enough to power hundreds of homes at once. The Oregon project would allow six data centers to tap power previously considered unavailable, Narayan said.
