The grid has vast amounts of underutilized capacity, if one only knows how to find it.
That’s according to Amit Narayan, CEO and founder of Gridcare, which emerged from stealth today. The company uses artificial intelligence to find this untapped capacity, so that developers scrambling for enough power for their data centers can position them to avoid increasingly long interconnection queues.
In recent months, global grid congestion has emerged as one of the main headwinds to the growth of the data center sector. Last month, the International Energy Agency found that approximately 20% of planned data center projects risk significant delays due to waits for interconnection that can stretch as long as a decade in key regions.
“Legacy ways of calculating capacity are overly conservative,” Narayan told Latitude Media in an email. “That’s why the existing grid operates at under 40% utilization; yet neither the loads nor the generators can find capacity to connect.”
With its AI-powered platform, Gridcare maps the utility network across both geography and time, analyzing the grid dynamically and taking advantage of on-site generation and batteries to remove grid constraints and open up new capacity.
The new company was co-founded in June 2024 by Narayan, who previously founded both the chip design automation company Berkeley Design Automation, which is now part of Siemens, and the distributed energy resources management platform AutoGrid, which was acquired by Uplight in December 2023.
Gridcare emerges from stealth with an oversubscribed $13.5 million seed round led by Xora, a deep technology venture capital firm backed by Singapore’s Temasek. Other investors include Aina Climate AI Ventures, Sherpalo Ventures, and Breakthrough Energy Discovery, among others.
Currently, Gridcare is working with “nearly all the major hyperscalers” and over 15 data center developers, Narayan said.
Enabling a ‘power-first’ approach
Gridcare’s platform, which combines generative AI with grid physics, collects “billions of data points across hundreds of relevant parameters, spanning both power and non-power criteria, from public and proprietary sources,” Narayan said. The result, he added, is a granular map of the available capacity on the grid.
The data collected includes grid network models and operational data, existing utility planning models and planned upgrades, forecasts, interconnection queues, permits, rates, and extreme weather data, among other things.
The company then validates its model and assumptions directly with utilities — its partners include Portland General Electric and Pacific Gas & Electric — before using it to help data center developers find available power.
“Ideally, Gridcare enters the process before traditional site selection, fundamentally changing how developers approach location decisions,” Narayan said. “Instead of the conventional ‘land-first’ model where developers find available land and then hope to secure power, Gridcare enables a ‘power-first’ approach.” This is a shift that is already happening elsewhere in the market; in December 2024, Google signed a strategic partnership with Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate specifically to pursue “energy-first” development.
Narayan estimates this approach could save valuable time, reducing time-to-power from five to seven years to as little as six months. Additionally, it would spare developers from having to start interconnection processes with multiple power providers at the same time to gauge which load request will pan out first. The habit, which has become almost the industry standard for large-load customers, is having the adverse effect of flooding power providers with speculative or “phantom” load requests, effectively clogging the system.
For data center developers with facilities that are already operational, the Gridcare platform can also find “new power” by engaging with the utilities and effectively acting “as a bridge between developers and utilities,” Narayan said. The company’s revenue model is based on “megawatts unlocked, which is earned when developers and utilities enter into a contract,” he added.
