Welcome, Emerald AI!
Transforming energy-intensive data centers into AI-powered grid allies.
October 29, 2025
- Founder: Varun Sivaram
- Industry: Energy & AI
- Location: Washington, DC
The Opportunity
U.S. data center electricity demand is projected to rise by as much as 130 GW (.130 TWh) by 2030 — nearly 12% of total U.S. annual power consumption. After a decade of relatively flat national electricity demand, this surge represents an unprecedented challenge for utilities.
The primary driver behind this growth is AI’s incredible compute demand. At its current pace, AI workloads are expected to fuel a 3.5x increase in global data center capacity — reshaping both the energy and digital infrastructure landscapes.
In short, AI’s insatiable demand for energy is far outpacing our ability to build new power generation, creating a bottleneck for AI’s growth. Hyperscalers, data center operators, and utilities need innovative solutions that can support AI-scale workloads.
The Solution
Emerald AI‘s Conductor software platform is a unique solution that addresses AI’s energy demand needs today, without new power generation. Conductor orchestrates AI workloads in real-time, allowing data centers to dynamically adjust energy consumption and support grid stability while maintaining acceptable AI compute performance. This ability to flex energy demand enables AI data centers to provide crucial grid relief during peak events, such as a hot summer day in Phoenix, by temporarily and precisely reducing electricity consumption while preserving compute service quality.
Emerald has already made great strides towards its mission:
- Emerald AI and NVIDIA, in collaboration with PJM (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection), Digital Realty, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) DCFlex Initiative, are partnering to launch the world’s first commercial-scale, power-flexible 96MW AI focused data center (AI Factory), establishing a reference design for future facilities. This new reference design will enable rapid scaling of power-flexible AI factories, while providing utilities and grid operators with a benchmark standard for power-flexible AI capabilities that can speed and expand power grid connections. This partnership stems from Emerald’s demonstration as part of EPRI’s DCFlex initiative in Phoenix, Arizona, which showed a GPU-based AI cluster reducing its energy use by 25% over a three-hour window during peak summer demand, while maintaining service levels.
- Emerald AI and National Grid have announced a strategic partnership and will deliver a UK‑first live trial in late 2025 on a grid‑connected data center. The trial will utilize Emerald’s platform and NVIDIA GPUs to dynamically adjust energy consumption in real time, accelerating interconnections and supporting grid stability across the UK.
If new AI data centers could flex their power requirements by 25% for two hours at a time, less than 200 hours a year, they could unlock 100 GW of new capacity to connect data centers—more than the entire U.S. nuclear fleet.
Why We’re Backing Emerald AI
There are few software solutions that can meaningfully increase grid power today, and Emerald AI stands out with its innovative approach and impressive team.
Emerald AI was founded by Varun Sivaram, who has unique experience bridging policy, energy demand, and AI. After completing his PhD at Oxford, Varun went on to serve as CTO at ReNew Power, teach as faculty at Columbia University, and, most recently, serve as Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Ørsted. Varun has also assembled an impressive leadership team to complement him. Professor Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s Chief Scientist, is the leading academic authority on orchestrating data center power demand to meet the needs of electricity grid demand response. Shayan Sengupta, the company’s Head of Engineering, joins from AWS where he led global engineering teams delivering specialized AI, HPC, and Mac compute platforms for cloud customers powering hundreds of millions in revenue across mission-critical workloads.
What’s Ahead?
As we continue to see power requirements stymie AI progress, solutions such as Emerald’s will be key to eliminating the power bottleneck.
We’re thrilled to partner with the Emerald team as they help power the future of AI. And we’re proud to support them alongside fellow investors LowerCarbon Capital, NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, and National Grid.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Emerald AI!
