Gridcare believes data center capacity of over 100 mw is hidden in the grid

Hyperscaler and data center developers are in Pickles: They’re all I’ll add computing power tomorrowhowever, the utility often works hard, citing years of waiting for grid connections.

“All AI data centers are struggling to connect,” says founder and CEO Amit Narayan Grid Caretold TechCrunch. “They’re so desperate. They’re looking for a solution. It might happen.

This has led many data centers to pursue what is called “.Behind the meter“Power supply – Essentially, they build their own power plants. This is an expensive effort that suggests how desperate you are for electricity.

However, Narayan knew that there was enough slack in the system, even though the utility itself hadn’t discovered it yet. He has studied the grid for the past 15 years. He first studied as a Stanford researcher and founder of another company. “When everyone thinks there’s no capacity in the grid, how can you generate more capacity?” he said.

Narayan said Gridcare, which runs on Stealth, has already discovered several locations where additional capacity exists and is ready to play matchmakers between the data center and the utilities.

Gridcare recently closed its overregistered $13.5 million seed rounds, the company told TechCrunch. The round was led by Xora, Temasek’s Deep Tech Venture Firm, and was attended by Acclimate Ventures, Aina Climate AI Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Clearvision, ClockTower Ventures, Overture Ventures, Sherpalo Ventures and Wovenearth.

For Narayan and his colleagues at GridCare, the first step to finding undeveloped capabilities was to map existing grids. The company has since used its generation AI to help predict what changes will be implemented in the coming years. It also layered other details, including fiber optic connections, natural gas, water, extreme weather, permits, and availability of community sentiment regarding the construction and expansion of data centers.

“There are over 200,000 scenarios that need to be considered whenever we run this study,” Narayan said.

To ensure that it is not violating the regulations, Gridcare will retrieve that data and weigh it against federal guidelines that determine the use of the grid. Once you find a spot, start talking to the relevant utilities to check your data.

“We know where the biggest bang for money is,” Narayan said.

At the same time, GridCare will work with HyperScalers and Data Center developers to identify whether they are trying to scale their operations or build new operations. “They have already told us what they are willing to do and we know the parameters they can manipulate,” he said.

That’s when matchmaking begins.

GridCare sells services to data center developers and charges them based on the number of megawatts that startups can unlock. “The fees are important to us, but they can be ignored for the data center,” Narayan said.

In some data centers, admission prices can gain grid power here and there for hours, and may instead rely on on-site backup power. For others, the path could be more clear if demand is close to green lights up the installation of new grid-scale batteries. In the future, the winner may be a developer who is willing to pay more. The utility is already approaching GridCare, asking about auctioning access to new capabilities.

Regardless of how that happens, Narayan believes that GridCare can use its approach to unlock capacity of over 100 megawatts. “We don’t need to resolve nuclear fusion to do this,” he said.