GridCare raises $64M to speed up AI data center projects

GridCare Inc., a startup that helps data center operators more quickly connect their facilities to the electrical grid, has raised $64 million in funding.

Early Nvidia Corp. backer Sutter Hill Ventures led the Series A round. GridCare stated in its announcement of the deal on Thursday that billionaire tech investor John Doerr, power utility National Grid plc and Stanford University were also among the participants. GridCare spun off from Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator program early last year.

One of the most time-consuming tasks involved in building a data center is sourcing electricity for the servers that it hosts. In many cases, the facility’s operator must finance new power lines to link the campus to the local utility’s grid. It’s often also necessary to invest in auxiliary components such as transformers, which lower the voltage of electricity to a usable level before it’s delivered to servers.

The largest data center projects require utilities to add new power generation capacity. That can extend a facility’s launch time frame by years.

Redwood City, California-based GridCare offers a software platform that reduces the amount of time needed to connect data centers to the grid. GridCARE Energize, as the product is called, achieves that by finding locations with underutilized power delivery infrastructure. Data center operators can connect their facilities to such segments of the grid without the need for time-consuming hardware upgrades.

GridCARE Energize uses artificial intelligence models to find underutilized power infrastructure. According to the company, its software takes “quadrillions of grid conditions” into account including residential power usage, the frequency of outages and weather. The amount of the cloud cover above a solar farm that supports a data center significantly influences its power output. 

GridCARE Energize overlays its findings on a map that data center investors can use to find suitable construction sites. It also highlights locations that have limited grid capacity, but could accommodate a data center equipped with so-called “flexible resources.” Those are power systems such as batteries and on-site solar panels that reduce the facility’s dependence on the grid.

GridCARE Energize also includes features for utilities. According to the software maker, power companies can use its platform to track customers’ electricity usage and related metrics. That information can be used to identify ways of onboarding data centers without creating grid reliably risks. Furthermore, GridCare says that its platform helps utilities optimize their investments in infrastructure upgrades.

Last year, the company partnered with Portland General Electric to connect 5 data centers to its grid. GridCare says that its platform sped up the project by several years and unlocked 400 megawatts of capacity. Today, the software maker is supporting data center projects in a dozen other markets that together have 2 gigawatts of computing capacity. 

“The largest source of new power for the AI economy isn’t waiting to be built,” said GridCare co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ram Rajagopal. “It’s already in the ground, hidden in the grid we already have.”

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