Mazama Energy Raises $135M Series B for Superhot Geothermal
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Mazama Energy has raised $135 million in an oversubscribed Series B to develop horizontal wells in superhot rock, each capable of generating 15 megawatts of electricity.
Centaurus Capital and Doerr Capital led the round. ConocoPhillips and Shell Ventures participated, existing investors Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier returned, and SiteGround Capital, H. Barton Asset Management, and the Jeffrey and Marieke Rothschild Foundation came in as new backers. Mazama was incubated at Khosla Ventures.
The company plans to start generating electricity sometime next year. Its first site in Oregon is now rated at 10 gigawatts of production capacity, a sharp upward revision from last year, when investor Vinod Khosla put the site’s potential at 5 gigawatts.
Enhanced geothermal has quietly become a serious contender for powering AI data centers and other large grid loads. Tech companies and data center developers have mostly bet on natural gas, while geothermal startups kept advancing the technology.
What separates this generation of projects from earlier geothermal work is depth and heat. Mazama drilled past 10,000 feet in 15 days on its way to roughly 15,000 feet. At that depth it reaches 750 degrees Fahrenheit, or 400 degrees Celsius, and at high pressure the water there becomes a supercritical fluid, neither fully liquid nor fully gas, which absorbs far more energy than ordinary steam. The company says that lets each well produce up to 10 times more power than traditional geothermal methods.
The scale of the resource explains the interest. Tapping just 1% of superhot rock worldwide could generate more than 63 terawatts of electricity, according to research from the University of Twente and the Clean Air Task Force.
Work at the Oregon site is still early, but Mazama has already secured land for a second development. It aims to finish the first site by 2030, generating 200 megawatts at that point.
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