Few energy sources can top geothermal’s potential, with at least 42 terawatts of capacity available worldwide, according to the IEA, more than twice the world’s energy use last year.

The technology is shaping up to be the energy world’s dark horse, even though investment in the tech pales in comparison to startups in advanced nuclear fission and fusion power.

That makes the $19 million in seed funding raised by a startup called Critical Energy especially notable. Critical Energy hopes to fill a major gap for geothermal power plants by building modular turbines tailored to them. The funds are earmarked to build its first 2.5 megawatt project, the startup exclusively told TechCrunch.

Meanwhile the darlings of the investment world, those working on nuclear fission and fusion, are targeting the early 2030s for their first commercial deployments. By that time, geothermal startups could be building gigawatt-scale power plants.

“Geothermal is going to beat them to it. By a lot,” Spencer Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Critical Energy, told TechCrunch. “In four or five years, I hope that we’re doing many gigawatts a year.”

Even modest expansion of geothermal could pay off to serve the world’s — and especially the tech industry’s — growing energy needs. A recent report said that advanced geothermal could power nearly two-thirds of new data centers by 2030.

But Jackson said there’s a looming shortage of compatible turbines. Many projects today are specifying large turbines, which can take months to years to assemble on site, he said. “It’s still way faster and cheaper to make it the other direction, to built it in a factory.”

Critical Energy hopes to fill the gap with modular turbines. To design them, Jackson leaned on his experience at SpaceX, where he worked on Falcon Heavy, Starship, and the Raptor rocket engine. To build them quickly, Critical Energy is working with machine shops to make the turbomachinery and other turbine components, which resemble rocket engines. It’s buying other parts off the shelf for now. In the future, the startup may decide to bring other pieces in house, similar to how Tesla and SpaceX have done, Jackson said.

The first power plant to use Critical Energy’s turbines is scheduled to be completed by 2027 and will be installed at an existing geothermal site similar to those found in Iceland or at The Geysers in Northern California. Critical Energy is also designing a larger, 5 megawatt module targeted at enhanced geothermal companies like Fervo Energy, which drill deeper into the Earth to withdraw more heat.

By the early 2030s, Jackson hopes Critical Energy will be making gigawatts worth of turbines. “We are looking for the fastest path to gigawatts of scalable power on the grid,” he said. “Long term goal is 300 gigawatts a year in 2045.”

Though geothermal development has been quietly proceeding, Jackson expects that once the technology is more mature, oil and gas companies will dive in, speeding things up considerably. 

“Geothermal is great because the oil and gas industry has the replicability to do hundreds and then thousand of wells. They’re very, very good at drilling wells,” he said. “But they need turbines and there’s going to be a massive shortage of those.”

The seed rounds were led by Susa Ventures and Upfront Ventures with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Humba Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and Underground Ventures. The startup also nabbed $3 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank bringing its total early capital to $22 million.

As global investors race to fund the infrastructure underpinning the artificial-intelligence boom, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s CPP Investments has committed up to ₹70 billion (about $741 million) to Indian data center operator CtrlS, betting on India’s growing role in the global buildout of cloud and AI infrastructure.

Under the partnership announced on Wednesday, CPP Investments will invest ₹40 billion (around $423 million) to acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS and commit up to ₹30 billion (about $317 million) to a joint venture to develop hyperscale data center campuses across India.

CPP Investments will own 48% of the joint venture, while CtrlS will hold the remaining 52%, the companies said in a joint statement.

Founded in 2007, CtrlS operates more than 15 data centers across India. The Hyderabad-based company has been expanding its footprint to meet rising demand from cloud providers, enterprises, and AI workloads.

India has become a major destination for data center and AI investments as global technology companies and investors ramp up spending to meet surging computing demand. Companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber have announced investments in the country in recent months, while operators are rapidly expanding capacity amid a broader global race to build AI infrastructure.

“As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets, India represents an important pillar of our global data center strategy,” said CPP Investments’ global head of real assets Max Biagosch in a statement.

CPP Investments, Canada’s largest pension investor, has been investing in India since 2009 and had net assets of about $20 billion in the country as of March 31, making it one of the largest foreign institutional investors in the market.

The investment builds on CPP Investments’ broader push into digital infrastructure. The pension fund said it has invested in the data center sector since 2017 and has built a portfolio of assets and joint ventures across major markets worldwide.

The partnership will help CtrlS expand capacity and build infrastructure tailored for AI workloads, said CtrlS founder and chief executive Sridhar Pinnapureddy.

The CPP-CtrlS deal is the latest in a string of investments targeting India’s data center sector. Earlier this month, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk said it would invest $30 billion to build five gigawatts of data center capacity in India by 2030. Meta, meanwhile, partnered with Reliance Industries last week on a 168-megawatt AI-enabled data center in the western state of Gujarat.

New Delhi has sought to position India as a global hub for digital infrastructure through a range of policy measures, including tax exemptions for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas through 2047, provided those workloads are run from data centers located in the country.

Indian conglomerates have also accelerated expansion plans to capitalize on the opportunity. Adani Group and Tata Consultancy Services are among the companies that have unveiled major data center projects aimed at supporting AI and cloud workloads. In 2023, CtrlS announced plans to invest $2 billion over six years to expand its data center footprint across India.

India’s growing role in AI infrastructure has not yet been matched by similar progress in developing frontier AI models. While the country has a handful of startups building indigenous AI models, including Sarvam, much of the underlying AI technology used by Indian companies continues to be supplied by U.S. firms.

The rapid buildout of data centers is also expected to increase pressure on electricity and water resources, highlighting some of the challenges that could accompany India’s ambitions to become a major AI infrastructure hub.

At conferences, speakers are often delivering their keynote or panel discussions in languages that many attendees might not know. That leads to users scrambling for their phones and opening translation apps to capture audio from a distance, which is not always effective. Mixhalo, a real-time audio startup that solves for situations like these, is joining DeepL to boost the German startup’s translation suite to help improve these kinds of translation experiences.

Mixhalo was founded in 2016 by Incubus guitarist and songwriter Mike Einziger, violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, and Vik Singh, who is now the CEO of the startup.

The company’s initial pitch was to improve the listening experience for concert attendees through its platform, but over the years evolved into a company that powers real-time audio for sports and live events. The startup raised over $39 million in capital from investors including Fortress Investment, Founders Fund, Defy Partners, and Cowboy Ventures.

Mixhalo’s CEO Singh said in an email that tons of voice models coming to market were beneficial to Mixhalo, as it could integrate a variety of them and compare performance. He said that the rise of voice AI didn’t directly contribute to acquisition talks, but as model companies grow big, they would “start encroaching” on the space Mixhalo operated in, making it difficult to win on pricing.

Mixhalo said it already relied on DeepL as its primary translation provider, and it made sense to work closer with the company.

Singh tells us: “The DeepL conversation was very organic. Mixhalo has been a long-time DeepL customer, and I attended a customer dinner and ended up seated next to Sebastian, DeepL’s CTO. We just got to talking, and the more we talked, the more obvious the overlap became across the event space, the API, and the application layer, whether that is voice for meetings, document translation, or live event.”

DeepL has been a text translation player for a long time, but in the last few years, it has started making noise about its voice products. In 2024, the company launched voice-to-text translation capabilities in over 33 languages. This April, it launched a voice-to-voice translation suite to support use cases like multilingual meetings. Mixhalo’s acquisition can push DeepL into the live event space with the same suite.

“For us, Mixhalo will work as a solution and also a marketing use case. The platform will allow us to show how DeepL’s tech works in real-time and in environments like conferences where people are present on the ground,” DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch in a call.

Kutylowski said that with the acquisition of Mixhalo, which is based in San Francisco, DeepL is opening an office in the Bay Area to expand its U.S. operations. Mixhalo competes with the likes of Wordly AI and Seven Seven Six-backed Palabra.