For years, the scarce resource in AI was chips. Now it is power.

Verse Enterprises wants to unblock that bottleneck. The San Francisco startup has raised an oversubscribed $54mn Series B. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round. GV, Nvidia and Norrsken VC also took part.

The race to AI is now a race to power

Data centres are scaling faster than grids can handle. In many regions, developers wait years just to plug in. Generation shortages, transmission bottlenecks and long interconnection queues all slow them down.

The strain is everywhere. Denmark recently paused new grid connections after AI data centres overwhelmed its system. The EU has even asked households to cut power use at peak times. Verse says hundreds of data centres sit stuck in utility queues, which it claims leaves $500bn in annual revenue on the table.

Skipping the line with batteries

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Verse’s answer is to jump the queue. Its new product, Dispatch Intelligence, manages on-site batteries and solar in real time. The grid then sees a flexible load instead of a constant one. Crucially, the data centre never throttles its compute.

For the hardware, Verse has teamed up with battery developer Calibrant Energy. Calibrant brings the on-site storage and solar; Verse runs the software. It is the same behind-the-meter logic now pulling money toward clean-energy-as-a-service startups. Together, the company says, they can bring new capacity online up to three years faster.

“Clean energy is actually the economic and feasible solution, because the speed of deployment is fast,” said Verse co-founder and chief executive Seyed Madaeni.

Will utilities play along?

The model is not a sure thing. Allison Weis, global head of storage at Wood Mackenzie, says flexibility can lower the barriers to connecting, but guarantees nothing. Utilities have not set standards for what data centres must do to get online faster. Nor have they confirmed that batteries or on-site power will count.

“There’s no uniform framework,” Weis said. That may soon change. US federal regulators are due to publish guidance on speeding up data-centre connections. The open question is who pays: the hyperscalers, through their own generation, or everyone else, through grid upgrades.

What the money is for

Verse is not alone in this race. Nvidia has also backed Emerald AI, which builds similar software, and Verse is now wiring Dispatch Intelligence into Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory design for gigascale sites. The chipmaker has good reason to help: every data centre stuck in a queue is one that cannot buy its chips.

The startup plans to move fast. It wants to manage more than 100 sites within a year. For Verse, clean power is no longer the slow option. It is the shortcut.