Ambrosia Energy building 10 GWh battery plant in Texas — SkimNews
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- Ambrosia Energy began work on a 10 GWh battery factory near Austin, Texas spanning 150,000 square feet, CEO Ben Longmier announced at TechCrunch Disrupt, with full production targeted within 2-3 years and enough output for roughly 300 MW of field-deployed power plants per year.
- Ambrosia Energy will start construction on its first commercial power plant in West Texas later this year, pairing 300 MW of solar panels with 660 MWh of batteries to deliver 30 MW of continuous power at a 99.3% uptime target.
- Ambrosia Energy emerged from stealth in June with a $100-per-megawatt-hour cost target for data center power, which Longmier said keeps the company profitable even with overbuilt solar and battery capacity and competitive with the natural gas turbines hyperscalers are planning.
- Ambrosia Energy co-founders Ben Longmier and Sara Spangelo previously built satellite constellation startup Swarm, which they sold to SpaceX, and are now betting that solar-plus-storage is the fastest, cheapest route to off-grid data center power.
- Ambrosia Energy's pilot-scale power plant has run continuously for over 100 days at 200 kW, and the company says its in-house battery pack design costs roughly 1.3x the bare cell, versus the 5-7x markup Longmier cited for typical stationary storage systems.
Why it matters: Ambrosia's $100/MWh solar-plus-storage pitch directly undercuts the natural gas turbines hyperscalers have been planning for new data center capacity, and a 10 GWh factory is what scales them from a 100-day pilot to commercial deployment. The first 300 MW West Texas plant going up this year is the test of whether battery-pack simplification can actually deliver hyperscaler-grade uptime.
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