Utilidata Inc. today disclosed that it has raised $40 million in funding from Renown Capital Partners and Keyframe Capital.

The cash infusion comes as an extension to a $60.3 million Series C round the company closed in April. That deal included the participation of Nvidia Corp. Utilidata will use the newly expanded round to expand the adoption of its flagship product, a compact hardware module called Karman (pictured) that data center operators can install in their server racks. 

Adding more servers to a data center usually requires the facility’s operator to purchase additional power from the local utility. In many cases, it’s also necessary to build a new power line. Such upgrades are not only expensive but can also take years. According to Utilidata, Karman enables customers to cut costs by making more out of their existing power instead of buying more capacity.

Data center operators historically allocated a fixed amount of electricity to each server rack. That power capacity often is underutilized. For example, a server rack may use less electricity than usual during scheduled maintenance or when it’s running low-complexity customer workloads. Server clusters used for artificial intelligence inference are especially prone to power draw fluctuations.

Utilidata says that Karman can measure a server rack’s energy consumption 1 million times per second. When power usage is lower than usual, the module reroutes the excess electricity to other parts of the data center. Utility claims that Karman can respond to utilization changes in 20 milliseconds, or less than 1-10th of a second.

Power draw fluctuations aren’t the only reason server clusters sometimes waste electricity. Data center operators often set aside power capacity to address unexpected workload usage spikes or hardware failures. According to Utilidata, Karman can spot cases where a company sets aside too much power.

The module is based on a custom version of Nvidia’s Jetson Orion Nano accelerator. The chip combines a six-core central processing unit with a 1,056 graphics card based on the company’s Ampere architecture, which made its debut in 2020. Nvidia says that the Jetson Orion Nano can perform up to 67 trillion calculations per second.

Utilidata’s latest raise comes three months after it inked a deal to deploy Karman in the data centers of infrastructure-as-a-service startup NextGen Cloud. According to the companies, the goal is to boost the facilities’ usable inference capacity by up to 50%.

Karman can be installed in not only data centers but also power grids. Hubbell Inc., a publicly traded maker of electrical equipment, will use the module to power residential smart meters. Karman can run edge applications that automate tasks such as monitoring grid health.

“The AI infrastructure buildout is one of the defining themes of this decade, but power is a fundamental limitation,” said Renown co-founder and Managing Partner James McIntyre. “Karman directly solves that problem by getting more out of the power that is available.”

Image: Utilidata