Ambrosia Energy has begun building a battery factory with a targeted production capacity of 10 gigawatt-hours near Austin, Texas, in a move aimed at providing independent power systems for data centers. Co-founder and CEO Ben Longmier announced the project during the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco.
The factory covers 150,000 square feet, and the company says it expects to reach full production within two to three years. According to Longmier, the factory’s production capacity will enable the construction of the equivalent of a 300-megawatt plant annually at customer operating sites.
An Independent Power Model for Data Centers
Ambrosia Energy emerged from stealth in June, announcing plans to build dedicated power plants for data centers at a targeted cost of $100 per megawatt-hour. The model relies on combining solar panels and batteries: solar power is used to serve the load and charge the batteries during the day, after which the batteries discharge at night or during cloudy days to maintain a continuous supply.
Longmier and co-founder Sara Spangelo chose this design because, according to their assessment, it is the lowest-cost and fastest-to-deploy option for operating data centers off-grid. The two had previously founded Swarm, a satellite constellation company, before selling it to SpaceX.
First Plant Targets 30 Megawatts of Continuous Capacity
The company is also beginning work on its first commercial plant in West Texas later this year. The plant will combine 300 megawatts of solar panels with 660 megawatt-hours of batteries to provide 30 megawatts of continuous capacity, with a target availability of 99.3%.
Ambrosia says that overbuilding the panels and batteries to ensure continuous operation does not prevent profitability at a price of $100 per megawatt-hour. The company believes this price could make its system competitive with gas turbines that many hyperscale data center operators plan to use.
What Matters in Battery Design?
The company seeks to reduce costs by simplifying components and manufacturing more of them in-house, including panel mounts and battery packs. Longmier said the company purchases ready-made cells but manufactures the packs internally after reducing the number of parts by roughly 100 times compared with what it saw at other competitors.
By his estimate, an Ambrosia pack costs approximately 1.3 times the cost of the underlying cell, compared with five to seven times in most stationary storage systems. The company also says that parts of its pilot plant have been operating continuously for more than 100 days, with a capacity of 200 kilowatts around the clock.
In practice, the model’s success remains tied to the company’s ability to convert the pilot project’s results into a large-scale commercial factory and maintain its cost and availability targets when operating larger plants. The figures cited also represent targets and estimates announced by the company, rather than completed operating results for its first commercial plant.