fresh funding

Houston company raises $100M Series D to scale industrial decarbonization tech

Utility Global’s H2Gen technology aims to decarbonize the heavy industrial sector. Photo courtesy of Utility Global

Houston-based Utility Global has raised $100 million in an ongoing Series D round to globally deploy its decarbonization technology at an industrial scale.

The round was led by Ara Partners and APG Asset, according to a news release. Utility plans to use the funding to expand manufacturing, grow its teams and support its commercial developments and partnerships.

“This financing marks a critical step in Utility’s transition from a proven technology to full-scale global commercial execution,” Parker Meeks, CEO and president of Utility Global, said in the release. “Industrial customers are no longer looking for pilots or promises; they need deployable solutions that work within existing assets and deliver true economic industrial decarbonization today that is operationally reliable and highly scalable. Utility’s technology produces both economic clean hydrogen and capture-ready CO2 streams, and this capital enables us to scale and deploy that impact globally with speed, discipline, and rigor.”

Utility Global's H2Gen technology produces low-cost, clean hydrogen from water and industrial off-gases without requiring electricity. It's designed to integrate into existing industrial infrastructure in hard-to-abate assets in the steel, refining, petrochemical, chemical, low-carbon fuels, and upstream oil and gas sectors.

“Utility is tackling one of the most difficult challenges in the energy transition: decarbonizing hard‑to‑abate industrial sectors,” Cory Steffek, partner at Ara Partners and Utility Global board chair, said in the release. “What sets Utility apart is its ability to compete head‑to‑head with conventional fossil‑based solutions on cost and reliability, even as it materially reduces emissions. With this new funding, Utility is well-positioned for its next chapter of commercial growth while maintaining the technical excellence and capital discipline that have defined its development to date.”

Utility Global reached several major milestones in 2025. After closing a $53 million Series C, the company agreed to develop at least one decarbonization facility at an ArcelorMittal steel plant in Brazil. It also signed a strategic partnership with California-based Kyocera International Inc. to scale global manufacturing of its H2Gen electrochemical cells.

The company also partnered with Maas Energy Works, another California company, to develop a commercial project integrating Maas’ dairy biogas systems with H2Gen to produce economical, clean hydrogen.

"These projects were never intended to stand alone. They anchor a deep and growing pipeline of commercial projects now in development globally across steel, refining, chemicals, biogas and other hard-to-abate sectors worldwide, Meeks shared in a 2025 year-in-review note. He added that 2026 would be a year of "focused acceleration to scale."

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A View From HETI

Lancium has partnered with AI leader NVIDIA. Photo courtesy Lancium

With an initial investment of $2 billion, AI chip manufacturer NVIDIA just acquired a 20 percent stake in The Woodlands-based Lancium, which develops large-scale campuses that combine AI data centers and onsite power supplies.

Lancium recently announced the investment but didn’t disclose the dollar amount. The Information news website reported NVIDIA’s investment totaled $2 billion, with the possibility of an additional $1 billion if Lancium achieves certain milestones.

Dealroom.co calls NVIDIA’s investment a “form of supply-chain insurance.”

NVIDIA “is gaining exposure to the scarce physical assets that determine whether its chips can be deployed,” Dealroom.co says. “The move makes Nvidia look less like a pure chip company and more like an allocator of infrastructure capacity.”

Investment precedes possible IPO in 2027

Thanks to NVIDIA’s cash infusion, Lancium and its portfolio of land and power connections carry an enterprise value of about $10 billion, according to The Information.

The investment should enable Lancium to expand as it explores a potential IPO next year, The Information reported.

Neither Lancium nor NVIDIA is responding to requests for comment about the deal.

Lancium’s marquee project is a 1,000-acre data center and power generation campus in West Texas for the $500 billion Stargate initiative. Stargate, a joint venture comprising MGX, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, is building data centers equipped to handle AI-level workloads.

“Epicenter of energy and AI infrastructure”

Founded in 2017, Lancium has 4 gigawatts of leased capacity and a more than 15-gigawatt development pipeline. In 2024, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners invested about $500 million in Lancium, giving Blackstone a roughly 50 percent stake.

“This partnership with NVIDIA is a strong testament to Lancium’s position at the epicenter of energy and AI infrastructure … . We look forward to continuing to partner with these leading companies to help power the next generation of AI innovation,” Bilal Khan, senior managing director at Blackstone, said in a release.

Through the NVIDIA partnership, Lancium’s data center and power generation campuses will use the tech company’s “AI factory” platform, including software, computing, and networking capabilities. This will give NVIDIA customers and partners access to power capacity that supports heavy AI workloads.

“We have spent years assembling the power, the land, and the infrastructure expertise needed to deliver AI data center capacity at a scale the world has never seen,” Michael McNamara, co-founder and CEO of Lancium, said in the release.

“Partnering with NVIDIA — the definitive technology platform for AI computing — ensures that every campus in our portfolio will be deployed with the industry’s most advanced technology and that NVIDIA’s customers will have access to the capacity they need to compete and lead in the AI era.”

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