The gas an oil well would burn off can run a data center. Unblock builds the data center that shows up to catch it.
Somewhere over Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale, at night, you can see the fires from the air. They are not accidents. They are gas - natural gas that came up with the oil, gas that has nowhere to go because no pipeline reaches this far, so the crew burns it off. Flares it. Turns a fuel into a smudge on the sky and a line item marked "loss."
Multiply that flame by every remote well on earth and you get one of the strangest facts in energy: some of the cheapest power in the world is being thrown away because it can't move. Meanwhile, an ocean of demand - AI, the hungriest customer computing has ever produced - is desperate for exactly that: cheap, abundant electricity, anywhere it can find it.
Unblock's whole idea fits in the gap between those two facts. If the energy can't travel to the customer, move the customer to the energy. Put the data center on a truck. Drive it to the flame.
We are building at the crossroads of AI's explosive energy demand and Latin America's vast bottlenecked energy resources.
Unblock funds, builds, owns and operates modular data centers that plug straight into energy that would otherwise be wasted - and asks the energy producer for nothing up front.
The unit is deliberately unglamorous: roughly two megawatts of computing packed into a 40-foot shipping container, factory-built, delivered plug-and-run. No grid connection. No pipeline. No interconnection queue - the years-long waiting line that keeps most new power projects stranded on paper. Unblock quotes two to four months from signed contract to switched-on.
What flows in is whatever the site is wasting. What flows out is compute - AI and high-performance workloads, or crypto - and a revenue share for the producer who used to pay to burn the stuff. The environmental math is the quiet punchline: you cut flare methane by up to 99% not by burning it cleaner, but by putting it to work instead.
~2 MW of compute in a 40-ft container. Factory-built, off-grid, deployed in 2-4 months.
Turns routine flaring into on-site power and compute, cutting flare methane an estimated 97-99%.
Creates flexible, behind-the-meter demand for clean power that the grid can't yet absorb.
Captures landfill methane - a potent greenhouse gas - and converts it into computing capacity.
Locate flared gas, stranded gas, or curtailed renewables at the source.
Deliver a factory-built container and generate power on-site. No pipeline, no interconnection.
Smart load scheduling ramps workloads up and down to match variable supply.
Producer earns revenue and cuts emissions; Unblock earns from the compute.
Ocampo founded Unblock in 2021 with a claim that sounds obvious only in hindsight: climate technology built in the United States takes more than a decade to reach the developing world, and by then the emissions are long spent. His fix was to become the local operator - the team that lands hardware, navigates the field, and makes global climate tech work in markets Silicon Valley usually skips. Latin America first. Africa and Southeast Asia on the map.
That second identity is written into the company's two front doors: unblock.energy for the machines, unblock.global for the mission. One sells megawatts. The other sells access.
At Unblock, our mission is to help leading climate technology companies enter and scale in Latin America.
$13.5M seed, July 2025.
Led by Goldcrest Capital and Collaborative Fund, with Argentine energy heavyweights and crypto-infrastructure investors joining to fund the Latin American expansion.
The combination of already de-risked technology with strong local execution makes them uniquely positioned to capture Latin America's massive stranded energy opportunity.
Unblock runs projects with Latin American energy producers and serves as the local deployment partner for global climate-tech firms. Named sites include Tecpetrol's Los Toldos II (~12 MW) and Pluspetrol's Loma Jarillosa.
We appreciate Unblock's unwavering commitment in the region, which is helping Crusoe further our mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate.
The data centers travel to the fuel, not the other way around - the compute lives inside a 40-foot container at the wellhead.
Argentina ranks as the 12th largest methane emitter in the world. Unblock built its business inside that problem.
Two web addresses, two identities: unblock.energy sells the hardware, unblock.global sells the market-entry mission.
The playbook flips a decade-long headache - instead of waiting years for grid interconnection, Unblock skips the grid entirely.
Interviews and demos aren't hosted here - these searches point to the latest video coverage and the company's own channels.
Founder interviews (YouTube search) Product & site demos (YouTube search) See the modules on unblock.energyFly over Vaca Muerta again. The fires are still there - flaring is not solved by one startup and a few hundred containers. But at some of those wells, the flame is smaller now, or gone, replaced by a boxy grey unit humming with the specific noise of processors under load. The gas that used to become a smudge on the sky is running somebody's model instead.
That is the whole trick, and it is not a small one. Unblock didn't invent flared gas, curtailed wind, or landfill methane. It noticed that all three are the same thing wearing different clothes - energy with no buyer - and that the largest new buyer in a generation didn't care where the electricity came from, only that it was cheap and it was there. So the company drove the buyer to the seller and took a cut of the introduction.
Eighteen people, fifteen megawatts, one flame at a time. The line item that used to read "loss" is starting to read something else.