Today, TIME named Emerald AI to its sixth-annual TIME100 Most Influential Companies list — a recognition of the 100 organizations making an extraordinary impact around the world this year. We are honored, humbled, and incredibly grateful to be included.

Standing alongside the companies on this year's list — many of which we deeply admire, some of which we have the privilege of partnering with — is a milestone we will not forget. It is also a powerful signal that the world is ready to fundamentally rethink how AI and energy work together.

Why Emerald, and why now

Finding and managing power has become one of the defining challenges of our era. AI's growth is colliding with the limits of physical grid infrastructure, slowing innovation and raising energy costs for communities across the country. We cannot build our way out on supply alone. We need intelligent demand.

Emerald AI was founded to make that a reality. Our Emerald Conductor platform turns the largest new source of electricity demand — AI factories — from a stressor on the grid into one of its most flexible and valuable assets. Over the past year, our team has proved this works in live commercial deployments across the United States and London, with partners including NVIDIA, National Grid, Salt River Project, Oracle, EPRI, PJM, Digital Realty, and Nebius.

The result is that the existing U.S. grid alone can accommodate roughly 100 gigawatts of new flexible load — more than a tenth of U.S. peak power demand — without major new build-out. That is enough to power the AI revolution today, while also speeding interconnection, lowering costs for ratepayers, and strengthening grid reliability for the communities that host AI infrastructure.q

A quote from our founder

"Energy is the critical bottleneck of the AI era, and being named one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Companies is a powerful signal that the world is ready for a different answer than 'just build more.' Emerald exists because the grid we already have, paired with intelligent demand, can meet this moment — faster, cheaper, and more reliably than waiting on infrastructure that takes years to deliver. We are honored to be recognized for that work, and grateful to the partners building it alongside us."

— Dr. Varun Sivaram, Founder and CEO, Emerald AI

This recognition belongs to a much wider circle than just our team.

To the engineers, scientists, policy minds, and operators who have built Emerald from a thesis into a working platform in under eighteen months — thank you. To our investors, who saw what was possible before there were demos to point at. To our utility, hyperscaler, AI, and policy partners, who took the leap to test something genuinely new on live infrastructure. And to the regulators, grid operators, and lawmakers thinking carefully about how to get this right — thank you for engaging with us.

We are at the very beginning of what AI flexibility can do for the grid, for the AI ecosystem, and for the communities that depend on both. We are just getting started.

How TIME chose the list

To assemble the 2026 list, TIME solicited nominations across sectors and polled its global network of editors, correspondents, and outside experts. TIME's editors then evaluated each nomination on four criteria: impact, innovation, ambition, and success. The result is a diverse group of 100 businesses helping chart what comes next.

Read the full TIME100 Most Influential Companies list of 2026 here: time.com/collection/time100-companies-2026

Read about Emerald AI here

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