Quaise Energy just raised $144 million to drill deeper than almost anyone thought sane, chasing rock so hot it turns a power plant into a machine that never has to stop.
Quaise Energy has raised $144 million in a Series B round led by Prelude Ventures, Bloomberg reported on July 7. The MIT spinout plans to pour the money into a drilling method that looks nothing like a standard oil rig. Instead of grinding through rock with a bit, Quaise fires millimeter waves from a gyrotron, essentially vaporizing stone as it bores toward superhot supercritical rock formations far below where conventional geothermal wells stop. Reach those depths, and you get a heat source dense enough to run a power plant continuously, no sun, no wind, no batteries required.
The company's first commercial target sits south of Bend, Oregon, near Newberry Volcano, an active volcanic complex that stretches roughly 75 miles across. Quaise calls the project Obsidian, and it's being built in two phases: a 50 megawatt first stage aimed at commercial operation by 2030, followed by an expansion to 250 megawatts. Bloomberg reported that Quaise has already signed a hyperscaler as a customer for that first 50 megawatts, evidence that buyers racing to power AI data centers aren't waiting for geothermal drilling to fully mature before locking in supply.
That urgency is the real story here. Data centers running large AI models need power every hour of every day, and the grid additions that can promise that reliably are limited: new nuclear, gas with carbon capture, or geothermal drilled deep enough to tap heat that never runs out. Nuclear carries years of regulatory review before a shovel goes in the ground. Geothermal drilling borrows permitting pathways and land access already worked out by the oil and gas industry, which is part of why investors are suddenly circling it the way they circled small modular reactor startups two years ago.
Quaise's raise lands seven months after Fervo Energy closed a $462 million round, with Google joining as a new investor alongside B Capital, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, CalSTRS and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, Bloomberg and TechCrunch both reported in December. Fervo is using that money to build a 500 megawatt project in Utah it expects to bring fully online by 2028, and it already sells Google 115 megawatts of power under a supply deal signed to help the company hit its goal of running data centers on carbon-free electricity by 2030.
Fervo's technology looks more like fracking than physics: horizontal wells and hydraulic stimulation, adapted from a decade of shale drilling experience and pointed at hot rock instead of oil. Quaise is betting on something stranger and further from proven, a drilling method that didn't exist as a commercial product a decade ago. In September, the company demonstrated it could bore through some of the hardest rock on Earth at up to five meters an hour, and in July it drilled a 118 meter hole in the field, outside lab conditions, according to Quaise's own announcements. That's real progress. It's also nowhere near the thousands of meters Obsidian will eventually require.
Quaise's chief executive, Carlos Araque, spent nearly 15 years at Schlumberger before joining MIT's The Engine, where he came across physicist Paul Woskov's gyrotron drilling research in 2018. Pairing an oilfield engineer's practical sense with a fusion scientist's exotic hardware is exactly the kind of resume investors like Prelude Ventures are betting will get millimeter wave drilling out of the demonstration phase and into a working plant.
GA Drilling, a Slovak startup chasing the same supercritical opportunity with a plasma based approach, has been closing smaller rounds of its own, and more will likely follow as the AI buildout keeps pushing utilities toward anything that promises firm, always on power. Whether Quaise's gyrotrons can drill fast enough and cheap enough to matter at gigawatt scale is still unproven. Newberry Volcano is where the industry will find out.
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