Quaise Energy has raised $144 million for a very hard promise: drill into rock hot enough to make geothermal power behave more like a round-the-clock power plant than a weather-dependent bet.
Quaise Energy is asking investors, utilities and data center buyers to believe in a drilling tool that still has to prove itself far below the ground. Bloomberg reported on July 7 that the MIT spinout raised $144 million in a Series B round led by Prelude Ventures, money the company plans to put behind millimeter-wave drilling, a method that uses a gyrotron to vaporize rock instead of cutting through it with a conventional bit.
That sounds exotic because it is. Gyrotrons are better known from fusion research than from oilfield work, and Quaise wants to use them to reach superhot rock formations that standard geothermal drilling can't economically touch. If the company gets there, the prize is simple enough for any power buyer to understand: heat that can run a plant continuously, without waiting on the weather or a battery dispatch window.
The first commercial target is south of Bend, Oregon, near Newberry Volcano, an active volcanic system the US Geological Survey describes as one of the largest volcanoes in the Cascade Range. Quaise calls the project Obsidian. The plan starts with a 50 megawatt first phase aimed at commercial operation by 2030, then an expansion to 250 megawatts. Bloomberg reported that Quaise has already signed a hyperscaler for the first 50 megawatts.
You should pay attention to that customer before you pay attention to the science fiction feel of the drill. AI data centers need electricity every hour, and the list of low-carbon options that can honestly promise that is short. New nuclear moves slowly, and gas with carbon capture remains politically and technically messy. Geothermal has one advantage the others don't: it can borrow people, rigs, maps and field habits from the oil and gas industry.
That doesn't make Quaise a near-term sure thing. It makes it a serious test.
Fervo Energy is already showing why investors have started taking the category seriously. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Fervo raised $462 million from investors including Google, B Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Devon Energy and John Arnold's family office. Fervo is putting that money into Cape Station in Utah, a project it expects to bring fully online by 2028. The company has also sold Google 115 megawatts from its Nevada project through a deal meant to help Google run data centers on carbon-free electricity by 2030.
Fervo's approach is easier to picture because it looks like the shale industry turned sideways. It uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic stimulation, but points the technique at hot rock instead of oil. Quaise is trying something less familiar. Its own announcements say it bored through hard rock at up to five meters an hour in September and later drilled a 118 meter field hole outside lab conditions. That's real progress, but don't confuse it with completion. Obsidian will need wells measured in thousands of meters, not a lab-scale or early field demonstration.
Carlos Araque, Quaise's chief executive, gives the company a useful bridge between those worlds. He spent nearly 15 years at Schlumberger before joining MIT's The Engine, where he encountered physicist Paul Woskov's gyrotron drilling research in 2018. That pairing matters. A fusion research tool by itself doesn't build a geothermal business. Oilfield discipline by itself doesn't create a new way through rock. Quaise needs both, and frankly it needs both to work under conditions that punish wishful thinking fast.
There are other companies chasing the same heat. GA Drilling, based in Slovakia, is working on a plasma-based route to supercritical geothermal resources. Fervo is moving with a more conventional engineering stack. Mazama Energy has drawn attention at Newberry as well. The field is no longer a set of neat climate-tech slide decks. It is becoming a race to prove which approach can deliver firm power at a price customers will sign for before the grid runs out of patience.
The hard question for Quaise is not whether superhot geothermal is attractive. Of course it is. The hard question is whether millimeter-wave drilling can get cheap and fast enough - and hold up over time - to matter at power-plant scale. Newberry is where that answer starts to get less theoretical.
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