Data centers face a conundrum: how to power increasingly dense server racks using equipment that relies on century-old technology. Traditional transformers are bulky and hot, but a new generation of solid-state transformers promises to address both problems while making power management more flexible. One solid-state transformer startup, DG Matrix, has raised $60 million in a Series A round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Engine Ventures led the round with ABB, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures.
The AI revolution has a power problem. Training GPT-4 required as much electricity as 10,000 U.S. homes use in a year. Multiply that by thousands of models being trained simultaneously, plus billions of daily queries. The result? A data center energy boom reshaping power generation. Facilities drawing 100+ megawatts each, with some hyperscale campuses approaching 1 gigawatt (the equivalent of small cities).
Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe. Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom's 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027.
NextEra Energy on Monday tightened its grip on hyperscaler power demand, adding 2.5 GW of new renewable projects for Meta while deepening its partnership with Google, which already covers about 3.5 GW of capacity. Taken together, Meta and Google now touch roughly 18 percent of the 33.4 GW of generating capacity in operation at NextEra Energy's subsidiary, NextEra Energy Resources, underscoring both the growing appetite for datacenter power and the consolidation of supply among hyperscale customers.
The first power projects in PG&E's pipeline to serve data centers could appear on the grid as soon as next year, despite some hints of softening demand, as the utility titan races to meet the tech industry's hunger for the data hubs. PG&E is in the final engineering stages for electricity projects that would produce a combined 1.6 gigawatts of energy to serve data centers in the South Bay, said Mike Medeiros, PG&E vice president of strategic commercial solutions,
Amazon added 3.8 GW of power in the last 12 months, expects another >1 GW in Q4, and plans to double AWS power capacity again by 2027. Power is becoming the main bottleneck for the industry, but Amazon is aggressively adding and immediately monetizing capacity. Trainium2 is "fully subscribed," already a multibillion-dollar business, and grew 150% q/q. Today it's mostly very large customers (example: Anthropic training Claude on ~500,000 Trainium2 chips, going to ~1 million).
