US data center orchestration firm Emerald AI has raised $150 million in Series A funding, bringing its valuation to $1.05 billion.

Energize Capital and DCVC co-led the round, with participation from a range of financial investors. Emerald said it will use the capital to scale commercial deployments worldwide, following the successful completion of its fifth demonstration project.

"We founded Emerald AI on the conviction that the intelligence driving the AI revolution could solve its own greatest bottleneck: power," said Emerald AI founder and CEO Dr. Varun Sivaram.

"Our demonstrations around the world proved that data centers can adjust their power use precisely when the grid needs relief, without compromising critical computing workloads. Today, that technology runs commercially at full data center scale, and this financing lets us take it everywhere AI is built, so the AI era can accelerate while the grid becomes more reliable and more affordable for the communities it serves."

The company’s flagship product is its Emerald Conductor program. The system serves as a mediator between the grid and data centers, orchestrating AI workloads in real time. This enables data centers to dynamically adjust their energy consumption, supporting grid stability while ensuring acceptable AI compute performance.

The company has completed five demonstration projects to test the viability of the system. These include three in the US, in Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Chicago, and one in the UK, in partnership with the National Grid.

The company announced its first commercial project in October, with the orchestration software set to be deployed at Nvidia’s under-construction 96MW Aurora data center in Manassas, Virginia.

The latest funding round is the company’s fourth. In February, the firm raised $25m in seed extension funding. The extension followed a $24.5m raise last July, which was boosted by $18m in October.

The company is a member of the Nvidia Inception program for startups and is also backed by Google’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt. The deal with National Grid was its first outside the US market.