Verdigris Compute announced a $550 million Series C last Tuesday, one of the largest cleantech startup funding rounds of the year, to build a geothermal-powered data center in southwestern Wyoming. The facility’s sole customer-facing product is a large language model that writes sustainability content. Fried Ocean spoke with the company’s co-founder and CEO by video call. The transcript has been condensed for length and to remove eleven uses of the word “frankly.”
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FRIED OCEAN: Congratulations on the raise. Walk me through what the money does.
CEO: So we’re building forty megawatts of clean baseload in the Green River Basin. Zero-carbon. Closed-loop. The heat’s already in the ground, we just go get it. And then that power runs our inference cluster.
FRIED OCEAN: And the inference cluster does what.
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CEO: It writes posts.
FRIED OCEAN: Posts.
CEO: Sustainability posts. LinkedIn, mostly. Some Substack. We do a lot of quarterly-impact-report ghostwriting for mid-cap consumer brands. Right now we’re at about nine thousand posts a minute at peak, which is roughly the entire global output of human ESG communications professionals, except it never asks for a standing desk.
FRIED OCEAN: Nine thousand a minute.
CEO: And the quality is genuinely strong. It knows to open with a personal anecdote about its daughter.
FRIED OCEAN: It doesn’t have a daughter.
CEO: Nobody’s daughter is doing the numbers the daughter does.
“The atmosphere doesn’t read the post”
FRIED OCEAN: I want to make sure I have the shape of this right. You are drilling into the crust of the earth, harvesting the residual heat of the planet’s formation, to spin up ten thousand GPUs, so that a beverage conglomerate can publish a carousel about how small changes add up.
CEO: Decarbonized. Every watt.
FRIED OCEAN: But the posts don’t do anything.
CEO: That’s a really reductive way to look at narrative infrastructure.
FRIED OCEAN: Is it inaccurate?
CEO: Look. Behavior change starts with awareness. Awareness starts with content. Content starts with compute. Compute starts with power. We’re just the first company honest enough to admit the whole chain is one thing and then own the whole chain.
FRIED OCEAN: Who reads them?
CEO: [pause] There’s a strong engagement story.
FRIED OCEAN: Who reads them.
CEO: Other models, largely. Sustainability-comms models at competitor firms, which then generate response posts, which our model quote-posts with a thoughtful reframe. It’s a very healthy ecosystem. Ecosystem’s actually a word we use internally.
FRIED OCEAN: So it’s machines writing posts about sustainability, to machines, about sustainability.
CEO: On clean energy. That’s the part everyone skips.
The investors
FRIED OCEAN: Your Series C was led by a climate fund.
CEO: Two climate funds and a sovereign wealth vehicle whose name I’m contractually not going to say on a podcast.
FRIED OCEAN: This isn’t a podcast.
CEO: Everything’s a podcast.
FRIED OCEAN: What did you tell them the exit looks like?
CEO: Honestly? At some point one of the hyperscalers is going to want forty megawatts of clean baseload in Wyoming, and they’re going to have to buy the whole company to get it, and they’ll shut the post thing down within a quarter.
FRIED OCEAN: So the actual asset is the power plant, and the sustainability-writing model is just a tenant you invented to justify building it.
CEO: The model has a name. Her name is Meadow.
FRIED OCEAN: Last question. Does Meadow ever write anything about the emissions from her own training run?
CEO: She wrote a beautiful piece about it. Vulnerable, accountable, really sat in the discomfort. Nine hundred words. Did four thousand impressions.
FRIED OCEAN: And?
CEO: And the crust of the earth is still hot, man. It’s still down there. We can do this forever.